"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Vibe-Coding an Attention Firewall, w/ Steve Newman, creator of The Curve
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Apr 19, 2026 
Steve Newman, creator of Writely, which became Google Docs, and founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, tours his homemade AI toolkit. He digs into an attention firewall, a reader app for taming information overload, custom dashboards, agent hooks, universal logs for debugging Claude, mobile voice workflows, security tradeoffs, and his anti-tokenmaxxing approach.
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Two Personal Tools Rewired Steve Newman's Workday
- Steve Newman built personal tools to survive overwhelming AI information flow and reclaim focus time, not to replace reading or maximize agent use.
- His two anchor projects are an RSS reader that pre-summarizes newsletters and an attention firewall that surfaces only urgent messages.
A Dumb Summarizer Was Good Enough To Start
- Steve Newman found that a dumb summarizer with no personal context was already useful enough to decide what deserves full reading.
- He simply dumps each post or transcript into an LLM, asks for a summary, and skims it in about 10 seconds.
AI Security Feels Dangerous But Failures Stay Sparse
- AI raises the security-utility tradeoff because giving assistants broad access also exposes other people's data entrusted to you.
- Steve Newman and Nathan Labenz both note the strange tension that everyone says current systems are insecure, yet catastrophic failures remain rare.