iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

What will the Chancellor put in the Budget on 28 October? @uk.policyengine.org opened 30 play-money markets on Manifold, CGT rate to mansion tax: manifold.markets/topic/uk-aut... We'll model whatever's in it; the prices tell us what to test in advance. Trade, or tell us what we missed.

manifold.markets

UK Autumn Budget 2026

UK Autumn Budget 2026 odds on Manifold

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

We project that 2025 Supplemental Poverty Measure will rise for children and fall for seniors compared to 2024, partly because thresholds rose 6.3% for renters and 4.4% for owners without a mortgage. Numbers come out in one minute, so we'll report back on how our predictions fared shortly!

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Reposted by Max Ghenis

The Axiom Foundation @axiom.org · 31/07/2026

Watch the briefing, review the slides, and browse the photos from our celebration, hosted by @publicpolicylab.bsky.social at their Brooklyn studio. You asked sharp questions and cheered us on. Thank you. — Max, Ariel, and Pavel

axiom.org

Launch week: 3,000 encoded provisions, 150+ attendees, one Brooklyn loft — Axiom Foundation

Inside the Axiom Foundation's launch week: the briefing webinar, the app and demo gallery now open to explore, and a night of cake and balloons in Brooklyn.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

The Axiom Foundation @axiom.org is live: a computable layer for the law. Open encodings — every value cites its statute, every clause carries its effective date, everything possible checked against external engines.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Just rebuilt RAMbar to show RAM by agent session — each Claude Code or Codex session plus everything it spawned. Mine found four MCP servers resident 21 times each, ~3 GB of duplicates. Orphan reclaim, kernel-pressure alerts that name the mover, an MCP server so agents check their own footprint.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Thanks to the @aspeninstitute.bsky.social Financial Security Program for having me at their Benefits Leadership Forum to talk policy analysis in the age of AI.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Couldn't be more excited to announce @axiom-foundation.org — public July 28. We're laying down a new open primitive for the AI era: the law, computable and verifiable. Starting with US tax and benefit policy, global everything after that. axiom-foundation.org

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

MacKenzie Scott has given away $26 billion. What did it buy in health? An interactive model from her own gift database: ~70,000 QALYs weighting each study by causal credibility; ~200,000 at face value. Drag the assumptions yourself: maxghenis.com/mackenzie-sc...

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I just became the first Straude user to report 1 billion output tokens. (The dollar column is API-list-equivalent — I'm on subscriptions.) Most of them went into things we start shipping this week.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Happy July 4! In case you were wondering about the water footprint of that beer you're holding, I did the math: 53,300 ChatGPT queries. Running 10 Claude Code tasks a day for a full year? Also one beer. Drink responsibly. Prompt freely. maxghenis.com/drinking-ai

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

This appears to be the first official U.S. federal social-science statistical release to rely on an external open-source model.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Last night at Civic Builders DC. Tax and benefit rules are public — computing them isn't. @policyengine.org makes that computation free and open source: change any reform, see who wins and loses, down to your own household. Slides: policyengine.org/slides/civic-builders-2026

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

The US government singled out one AI lab — by administrative letter, under no published standard — and cut roughly a third of its own researchers off from the frontier models they build. The same researchers could use internal frontier models at any competitor tomorrow. substack.com/home/post/p-...

substack.com

The US government is gutting Anthropic's R&D capacity

A Commerce export control pulled Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Friday, cutting roughly a third of Anthropic's own researchers off from the models they build, while every competitor's keep theirs.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

We built PolicyBench to test whether frontier models can calculate a household's taxes and benefits without tools. The best, GPT-5.5, gets 80.3% to the dollar. To get to 100%, agents need to hand this to a deterministic engine. Just too hard to map out the statutes, regs, and forms in your head.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Spent last week at @rockefellerfdn.bsky.social Bellagio with leaders from government, technology, and philanthropy, on human-centered government in the age of AI. The line that survived every argument: the system, not the person, should carry the burden of complexity.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Presented @us.policyengine.org at @budgetmodel.bsky.social — rules, data, behavioral assumptions, and where AI is taking each. Thanks to Kent Smetters and the PWBM team for hosting.

Max with PWBM staffers in front of the PWBM sign

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Gave a talk at the Congressional Budget Office this week on AI and policy modeling. A policy projection rests on four pieces: encoded rules, calibrated data, dynamic responses, and the analysis that turns numbers into counsel. AI is now reshaping each one.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

I built OpenMessage to give Claude Code / Codex access to my Google Messages texts. Recently added WhatsApp and Signal support, and I now use it daily instead of those three native apps. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I tested Talkie-1930's math abilities. On rote arithmetic, it matches or exceeds GPT-3 175B (13× larger). On 5-shot GSM8K word problems, it scores 4.9% — same-size LLaMA 13B scores 17.8%. Also built a tool to explore its responses.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Looking forward to this, especially: - Panel with three orgs, three products, same open rules engine - @daphnehansell.bsky.social's Coverage Compass talk - @arielmai.bsky.social's Rules as Code lunch If you're in Chicago let's connect!

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

AI will change society more quickly than ever before, and policymakers will have to respond with unprecedented urgency. We need to equip them with the most predictive combination of economic models, forecasting, and AI to align outcomes to our shared values through policy.

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Reposted by Max Ghenis

PolicyEngine @policyengine.org · 03/05/2026

Today at 11 AM at EAGxDC: why frontier LLMs miss basic tax and benefit math, what changes when AI agents call an open simulator, and where our new initiatives like PolicyBench and the Economic Parameter Atlas come in.

Poster: Harnessing AI for Policy Research

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

We added a ton of ingredients to the @policyengine.org cauldron last month: - 1,039 PRs merged (7× April 2025, 2× March 2026) - 341,318 source-code lines changed - 19 new repos US childcare subsidies, Forbes 400, UK student finance — all make our models more accurate and comprehensive.

Poster with PolicyEngine's April 2026 GitHub Hoard

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

On the @ezraklein.bsky.social show, Ray Madoff claimed that Zuck, Bezos, Musk, etc. are "just as likely to be in the 40% of nonpayers as they are in the top 1% of payers." Data suggests the ratio among centibillionaires is more like 1 nonpayer per 7 top-1% payers. maxghenis.com/blog/madoff-...

maxghenis.com

Billionaires aren't 'just as likely' to be nonpayers as top taxpayers

Checking Ray Madoff's claim on The Ezra Klein Show against ProPublica and PolicyEngine microdata.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Lots of great research predicting the effect of AI on wages, unemployment, the labor income share and more. This first microsimulation experiment shows the possibilities of translating those market effects into household resources through public policy.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Yesterday I told 70 nonprofit CIOs to lock their CEO in a room and make them use coding agents. AI gives enormous new resources to pursue a mission. No other way to internalize it and expand your thinking of what's possible.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Great conversations with researchers and technologists at the inaugural Google / MIT FutureTech AI for the Economy Forum today. Big opportunity uniting approaches to accurately model the impact of AI on the economy, and the impact of public policy in shaping that relationship.

Max in front of the AI for the Economy Forum poster

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Grateful to the Berkeley IEOR magazine for sharing our work localizing evidence-based policymaking @policyengine.org ieor.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...

Alumni Notes section including PolicyEngine

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Hooked up Straude today and discovered I'm #1 this week globally — $20K in token volume at list prices, 3.3× ahead of #2. About 40B tokens in 7 days between Codex and Claude Code.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Here @jasondebacker.bsky.social, @roxanagonzalez.bsky.social and I elicit LLMs' views on how people respond to tax policy by assigning them personas. As we increasingly consult AI for policy advice, their assumptions on these dynamics will alter predictions. Much more to learn along this frontier.

sc.edu

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

OpenAI's new document for these tax and transfer policies: - Higher taxes on capital gains and corporate income - Taxing sustained AI-driven returns and automated labor - Wage-linked incentives - A Public Wealth Fund distributed directly to citizens - Automatic stabilizers openai.com/index/indust...

openai.com

Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age

Explore our ambitious, people-first industrial policy ideas for the AI era—focused on expanding opportunity, sharing prosperity, and building resilient institutions as advanced intelligence evolves.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Speaking at the CIO4Good Summit next Tuesday in Arlington — two sessions on AI in nonprofits. 9am panel on building data + AI foundations: governance, culture change, getting AI working across an organization. 10:15am hands-on workshop on AI-driven software development for nonprofit teams.

Image of Max Ghenis at CIO4Good with session descriptions

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Great to see this from the Living Wage Institute team. I met their co-founder in NYC last week and learned more about their work giving employers a clearer picture of taxes and credits affecting their hourly workforce. Glad to see PolicyEngine powering the tax calculations behind it.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Built an interactive viz of Dell (2010) on Peru's mining mita — colonial forced labor abolished 200+ years ago that still shows up in child stunting, consumption, and road density today. The map morphs into a scatter plot as you scroll. Districts become data points. maxghenis.com/mita

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

In February, I launched OpenMessage — an open source local AI-connected MacOS app for Google Messages. Just redesigned it and added WhatsApp support. Now my daily driver for both chat surfaces. Free and open source: openmessage.ai

OpenMessage desktop app showing a group chat with an AI-drafted reply, alongside a terminal where Claude uses MCP tools to read conversations and compose messages.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Berkeley and Hoover economists make several diverging assumptions around California's billionaire tax, resulting in dramatically different revenue estimates. We've put them all in a tool you can explore - updating daily from the Forbes list.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

We looked at every general-purpose chip on the market, and none of them could compute a marginal tax rate fast enough. So we made our own.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

I built farness.ai — a decision framework for AI agents. Instead of "should I do X?", it forces a forecast: KPI, confidence interval, base rate, disconfirming evidence, review date. Works with Codex, Claude Code, and any agent that speaks MCP. pip install farness

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Claude Code now defaults to medium effort. You can persistently set that to high with `/effort high`, or change it to max for the current session with `/effort max`. To set it persistently to max, add to ~/.claude/settings.json: "env": { "CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL": "max" }

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a congressional committee has built a public tool on an external open-source economic model. It's also the JEC's first public tool powered by microsimulation — their other interactive tools are data visualizations of government statistics.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Ask an AI model to make a common chart in a React app, and it’ll pick Recharts (27k GH ⭐). The tick marks bothered me, so I fixed them. That change is now live in the latest release. Use `niceTicks="snap125"` to activate it. My PR: github.com/recharts/rec... Related: github.com/recharts/rec...

Side by side charts using adaptive and snap125 ticks.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I recently spoke at @MITFutureTech about a question that sits behind a lot of AI economics work: how will policy shape AI’s impact on inequality? We're applying @ThePolicyEngine's microsimulator to analyze how tax and benefit policies mediate AI-driven economic change.

PolicyEngine title slide on a teal gradient background. Large text reads, “How will policy shape AI’s impact on inequality?” Subtitle: “Open-source microsimulation infrastructure to analyze how tax and benefit policies mediate AI-driven economic change.”

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

A treat to join the MyFriendBen team's AI design session at Gary Community Ventures in Denver this week. Their open source multi-benefit screener, powered by the @us.policyengine.org API, has already helped over 65,000 families across five states identify benefits they might be eligible for.

Max Ghenis with the MyFriendBen team holding the MyFriendBen poster

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

TAXSIM has powered tax policy research for decades — excited to partner with NBER to build its open-source successor at PolicyEngine.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

We're all in on Claude, today more than ever.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Bad Bunny named every country in the Americas at the Super Bowl last night. Here's the data behind the gesture: - 53% of US immigrants come from the Americas - 93% of ICE arrests target them - 45M people speak Spanish at home My latest: maxghenis.com/blog/bad-bunny-immigration-enforcement/

maxghenis.com

Where US immigrants come from, and where ICE focuses enforcement

Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show highlighted the Americas. Here's what the data shows about immigration and enforcement patterns.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

I built OpenMessage — an open-source Google Messages client for Mac with a built-in MCP server. AI assistants can read, search, and send your texts. Local-first, no cloud. Same libs that power Beeper — but open source and AI-native. Apache 2.0. openmessage.ai

openmessage.ai

OpenMessage

Open-source Google Messages client with AI tools. SMS + RCS from your desktop, with MCP support for Claude and other AI assistants.

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

My 16GB MacBook Air couldn't handle all my multiclauding. Upgraded to 48GB—crashes stopped, but no visibility into which session ate RAM. I built RAMBar—my first macOS app—to fix this. Memory by Claude session, Chrome tab, VS Code. brew install maxghenis/tap/rambar

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Max Ghenis @maxghenis.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Running multiple Claude Code sessions? VS Code's terminal panel only splits in one direction—no 2D grids. I built TerminalGrid, my first VS Code extension, to fix this. Cmd+K Cmd+Right, Cmd+K Cmd+Down—true grid layouts. 44 seconds to see it in action:

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