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Our Arsonist-Firefighter-in-Chief

Trump is always the hero of his own disaster. He batters the economy with tariffs and then bai…

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Each week, there is at least one story that, in olden times, would have driven weeks of coverage and congressional investigations, but that under Trump just slips by with a shrug.

This week’s candidate: on Tuesday, the Times reported that…

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1. Trump’s Gas Price Penalty

The new NYT/Siena poll is the latest evidence of Trump’s dramatic approval-rating collapse. Trump hit a second-term low of 37 percent.

Trump’s second-term trajectory is quite different from that of his first term. In this graph, his approval rating for b…

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You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Learning to Code, Part 3

Don’t Call It Vibe Coding

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy is a big deal in the tech world. He was a member of the original team at OpenAI, the former head of AI at Tesla, and the founder of Eureka Labs, an AI education startup. A year ago, he coined a term that helped launch an amateur coding…

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Learning to Code, Part 2

Why Everyone Hates AI

My decision to create an alternative to TurboTax came at a good time. Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to code anymore to create software. Unfortunately, you have to use AI if you want to build anything decent, and I shared the same view as so many others: it suc…

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TelosTax

It’s tax filing season, and as I was making my way through TurboTax’s clunky, overpriced app, I started to get frustrated. I’d spent almost $200 on the software, and it kept interrupting my data entry with scammy upsell offers.

Then I hit a screen that blocked me from continuing until I decided whether to agree to a new set of terms. My experience using the app would be much better if I said yes. I read the tiny fine print.

Intuit, the $125 billion company that makes TurboTax, wanted all of my tax data for five years so it could share and monetize it across all of its software offerings, including Credit Karma, the fastest-growing part of Intuit’s data empire.

“Right now, we can only use your tax info to help you prepare and file your return,” an FAQ cheerily noted, “but with your consent, we can do a lot more.” I would be able to “work smarter,” “file faster,” and receive “an even higher level of service.” Buried in the last lines, I learned that my tax return data could be sent to something called the Intuit Product Development Center.

In India.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to paid tax prep software are limited. The IRS used to offer Direct File, a free online tax filing system that was popular and easy to use. But Intuit mounted a massive lobbying and influence campaign, convincing the Trump administration to kill Direct File, which makes the company’s aggressive attempts to monetize the most sensitive financial data of the 40 million Americans who use TurboTax even worse.

I found all of this extremely annoying. But over the winter, Intuit’s fellow tech industry oligarchs delivered a potential solution: AI-coding tools that enable anyone to create software.

So I decided to build my own TurboTax.

I should point out that I know nothing about coding. The last time I remember coding anything on a computer was in 1983, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Bilitsky, taught our class how to use BASIC on a Commodore PET.

I have no specialized knowledge of U.S. tax law.

And yet, in just a few weeks, I created what appears to be a full-featured financial app that prepares complicated federal and state tax returns for free.

It’s TurboTax on steroids.

Naturally, I decided to call it TelosTax. The app guides you through your taxes step by step in an interview mode. If you’re a tax pro, you can enter your info directly on any of dozens of IRS tax forms. It can import your tax documents. It can organize your spending transactions by tax category. It has a dashboard where you can adjust sliders for over 20 different tax variables. It gives you a FICO-like score to assess your likelihood of being audited. The app produces pretty donut and bar charts summarizing your finances and flow visualizations that trace the trajectory of every dollar of your income, deductions, credits, and the taxes you pay.

Without any special skills, I was able to prompt coding tools to translate thousands of pages of U.S. tax law and regulations into an app that can produce a federal tax return for any American—from the simplest W-2 employee taking the standard deduction to a complex filer with, say, farm income, rental properties, asset depreciation schedules, AMT adjustments, crypto sales, a Roth conversion, net operating loss carryforward, and every imaginable combination of deductions and credits.

On the public repository where TelosTax now lives, I’m listed as the “author” of the app’s 234,000 lines of code, despite the fact that I did not write even one of those lines. I asked my new robot friend, Claude Code, the AI that wrote the whole thing, how long it would have taken a human to do the job.

“Without AI assistance,” Claude said, “I’d estimate 2-3 years for one person with the right skills.”

At first, that flattering response made me marvel that I had built something this complicated in just a few weeks.

But then it filled me with dread, because it hinted at the obvious limitations of using these tools without the proper training in coding or tax law. Two-hundred-thirty-four-thousand lines is a lot of code. Like good writing, good code is concise. The frontier AI models—Claude, GPT, Gemini—are trained to be useful and compliant, which makes them sycophantic. Did Claude actually build me a bloated, unmaintainable pastiche of features that proves the opposite of what I intended—that the big software companies have nothing to fear from vibe coding amateurs?

If the app holds up and works as advertised by Claude, I’ll never need to use TurboTax again. But the reverse could be true: maybe Claude, in its effort to please, created a Potemkin app that simply fooled me into thinking it was in the same league as a product designed by hundreds of engineers at a Fortune 500 company.

To help answer that question, I’m making the app public as a free open-source project so tax professionals and actual human coders can vet it. The idea behind this series is to explore two related issues:

• Whether new AI-coding tools are really up to the task of replacing premium software

• How journalists can use AI, which everyone seems to hate, for a positive public-interest goal

So consider TelosTax an experimental prototype and don’t use it to prepare your taxes unless your return is carefully reviewed by a professional. It’s possible Claude got everything wrong. If you’re a tax professional or programmer who would like to help stress-test the app, please email me at ryan@telos.news. But anyone can play around with it, dig into the code, and contribute to the project. You can check out the code and documentation on GitHub, and the app is now live at its new home: https://telostax.app. I’ll report back on how it holds up, and whether Intuit has anything to worry about.

The rest of this series is divided into four parts that track my own circuitous journey exploring these issues over the last month:

• Part 1 (Today): How Intuit Killed Direct File — The story of Intuit’s attack on a popular program—and how the Trump administration gave the company everything it wanted

• Part 2 (Wed): Why Everyone Hates AI — To build my own bespoke software, I had to confront my knee-jerk hostility to AI, which I had come to associate purely with slop and an impending jobs apocalypse—starting with journalism. I was wrong (mostly).

• Part 3 (Thu): AI Comes for the Coders — A look at how coders have navigated the end of coding and the lessons that journalists—and every other white-collar profession—can learn from them

• Part 4 (Fri): The AI Rabbit Hole — My own weird experience falling down the rabbit hole of AI-coding to build a tax app

It’s been a fun ride, and I’m glad to finally get to share all of the details with you.

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Part 1: How Intuit Killed Direct File

Why we can’t have nice things (tax-filing edition)

Intuit’s invasive privacy policies sent me on an odyssey to understand how the hell they get away with this. The simple answers are: money and Trump.

Since 2015, Intuit has spent $33 million on an influence campaign in Washington, D.C., to make it more expensive for Americans to file their taxes. The company’s number one goal, as laid out in lobbying disclosures and SEC filings, was to stop the federal government from providing a free, simple tax-filing system.

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I threw a lot at it. At a certain point, it started cutting corners. The more I asked it to d…

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—Ryan

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☀️ Afternoon Briefing — Wednesday, February 11, 2026

A 5-minute read on a day …

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Yesterday’s experimental AI-assisted newsletter drew mostly negative reactions in the comments. Some of that is fair—it was way too long. But there’s a deeper issue: once something is labeled AI, it immediately changes how people experience it.

I’m not immune to that reaction. If I loved a new song and then learned it had been created with AI, I’d stop l…

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Last week Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, quietly released some plugins for Claude, including one that performs legal services. Wall Street freaked out.

Investors didn’t just punish companies tied directly to the legal profession. They dumped a much broader swath of stocks across software, financial data, and real estate. For two days, markets…

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Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an unarmed protester who was shot in the back and murdered by federal agents, who continued to fire at him even after he was lying on the ground, lifeless.

One of the agents who surrounded Pretti literally applauded as his colleague murdered Pretti.

The videos are not ambiguous. They clearly show an agent …

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Chairman Trump

Over the last few days, with all the attention on Donald Trump trying to take over Greenland, his plan to create and lead an institution he said “might” replace the United Nations has escaped scru…

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Combat Journalism

Given all the twists and turns of this long, multi-part story and the often bizarre and sensationalistic details, I realize that some readers may have lost sight of something: the biggest and most newsworthy revelation of this series is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conspired with a reporter to abuse a D.C. court so he could save his relationship with Trump and become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.

We are living in a new era of combat journalism in which any high-profile political reporter will encounter ferocious bad-faith attacks from those in power. And during the Trump era, the attacks have intensified from harsh language—“enemy of the people”—to using the machinery of government to target reporters.

It started with civil lawsuits, usually defamation, to harass reporters with time-consuming litigation, intrusive discovery requests, and the depletion of bank accounts. Last year, it grew to encompass the unprecedented use of state power to shape the editorial policies of newsrooms within large companies subject to government regulation.

This week, the legal harassment escalated to the next step: the use of the criminal justice system to seize a Washington Post reporter’s laptops and phone, potentially giving the Trump administration access to all her confidential sources and other highly sensitive information.

Like most political journalists, I have witnessed plenty of hostile rhetoric, both from activists on the margins of politics and from high-level government officials. I’ve also been the target of a frivolous defamation lawsuit from one of the most powerful officeholders in Washington. And unfortunately, I have also seen up close how political actors can weaponize criminal charges against a reporter to prevent him from reporting unwelcome information.

In my case, a future cabinet secretary and one of Trump’s most important campaign allies persuaded his paramour, my ex-fiancée Olivia Nuzzi, to file a false complaint against me to stop me from writing about him in the weeks before the 2024 election.

The longtime legal and political writer Scott Lemieux, who correctly noted that the “heart” of this story is “that Nuzzi’s goal was to suppress damaging information about RFK Jr. both to help Trump and to protect RFK Jr.’s chances of becoming” HHS Secretary, has described these revelations as “almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism.”

Bigger, he argues, than Judith Miller, whose pre-Iraq war reporting for the New York Times was part of “one of the worst systemic failures in the history of American journalism,” according to New York magazine.

Bigger than Stephen Glass, who committed “the most sustained fraud in modern journalism,” according to Vanity Fair.

Bigger than Jayson Blair, whose fabrications and plagiarism at the Times were “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” according to the Times itself.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Given the scale of the Kennedy-Nuzzi scandal, the question I’ve been asked most frequently is, “Why didn’t you tell anyone about all of this when it could have mattered?”

Maybe it could have changed the election.

Maybe it could have affected Kennedy’s confirmation.

Maybe it could have prevented several major media companies from hiring, publishing, and promoting the work of a journalist who crossed such serious ethical lines.

I’ve already explained, in excruciating detail, what happened to prevent the story from being told before the 2024 election.

But what about after that? Many of you have asked me what happened after Nuzzi was forced to withdraw her false claims in D.C. Superior Court on November 8, and I returned to Politico as its Chief Washington Correspondent.

Politico never ran an article about any of this. Why didn’t I tell Politico’s editors about what I knew, which would have been a sensational story for Politico to investigate and publish?

The answer is that I told Politico’s top editor everything.

After its investigation of Nuzzi, New York magazine issued a statement absolving her of wrongdoing. Why, given what I knew, didn’t I tell New York about Nuzzi’s journalistic fraud?

The answer is that I told a senior editorial staffer at New York everything.

Simon & Schuster allowed American Canto out into the world without basic vetting. I had a working relationship with the editor and publisher of Avid Reader, the imprint that published the book. Why didn’t I tell one of them what I knew?

The answer is that I told the publisher everything.

To help promote her book and her return to journalism, The New York Times published a puff piece on Nuzzi, accompanied by a glamorous video and photo essay. Political reporters at the Times, several of whom knew the real story, told me they were appalled by the article, which was eviscerated by Times readers as “hagiography,” “a toothless examination,” and “a fashion shoot” serving as “clickbait.” But I was quoted in the article, so why didn’t I tell the reporter what I knew, which could have saved him and the newspaper from embarrassment?

The answer is that I told the Times reporter who wrote the article everything.

Mark Guiducci, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and his superiors at Condé Nast, hired Nuzzi as an editor and published a widely panned excerpt from her book without conducting basic due diligence about this scandal. The magazine claimed it was “taken by surprise” by the revelations of Nuzzi’s journalistic malfeasance. Shouldn’t they have known better?

The answer is, yes, they should have.

“Why didn’t they care?”

These media companies either knew about, or, in the case of Vanity Fair, should have known most of what I reported in this series, including:

• Kennedy’s role in weaponizing a domestic violence court against a journalist to prevent the publication of damaging reporting about him

• Kennedy’s alleged use of psychedelics and ketamine

• Kennedy’s toxic manipulation of a female reporter 39 years younger than him (I recommend this TNR piece by Nina Burleigh if you think this doesn’t matter.)

• Kennedy’s knowledge of the illegal recording of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, from which he may have gained valuable information to aid him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump

• Kennedy’s extreme recklessness and poor judgment in regularly masturbating on camera for a reporter and soliciting and sending the reporter explicit pictures and graphic poetry both before and after his security adviser told him that his phone had been hacked (again, read the Burleigh piece if you recoil at the thought of this being part of the public discourse)

• Nuzzi’s year-long effort working as a political operative for Kennedy while covering the presidential campaign, including catching and killing negative stories and betraying confidential sources to Kennedy

The real question isn’t, “Why didn’t I tell anyone?” The real question is, “When I did, why did no one seem to care?”

I think I know the answer.

So I’m going to take you behind the scenes at each of these five institutions—Politico, New York magazine, Simon & Schuster, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair/Condé Nast—to explain how these pillars of the American media not only ignored this story, but tried to bury it, favoring instead the fictitious counternarrative spun up by Nuzzi and Kennedy to evade accountability.

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In this email are the two concluding sections of the series. The final installment of the Bamboo Series will land later this week. And I’ll also have something fun for you tomorrow. As always, thanks for reading!

—Ryan

VIII. Chain of Custody

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The subject line got right to the point: “MURDER COVER UP.”

On December 7, Cornwell sent an email to Volzer, the conservator; Elliott P. Park, Biss’s receiver; and Tenley Carroll Seli, the official handling Biss’s case at the Virginia State Bar.

“So anybody want to explain where Steve got 3 million dollars after Jim Dimartino’s death when he was suspended the entire prior year?” she wrote. “OH YEAH that would the 506 exception that they used to divvy up companies they stole using the SEC. So iam going to get steve’s tax returns today from where I store my stuff to demonstrate that at no time did steve ever make this kind of money. So enjoy the notoriety. You are covering up murder, there is an innocent man in jail.”

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In this email is Part VII—where the plot takes a turn from weird to insane. I’ll send the ending to this piece tonight, and I’ll also post a podcast version in case you want to listen to the entire article.

The final installment of the Bamboo Series will land later this week. Thanks for reading!

— Ryan

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VII. The Conservator

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On August 30, two weeks after Biss’s stroke, Harvey J. Volzer, a Virginia lawyer, sent an email to Biss’s estranged wife, Tanya Cornwell.

“If you bring Steve’s lap top next Tuesday, I will get it to Kevin Hooks,” he said. “We also can discuss any additional documents/pleadings regarding Steve.”

Hooks is a prominent private investigator in Virginia whose firm, Interprobe, offers, among other services, “device data extraction.”

Cornwell responded early in the morning on September 5: “I took care if [sic] the computer last week.”

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VI. Dodecahedron

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On the morning of August 16, 2023, Biss started his day the way he usually did, scanning right-wing news sites and posting on Truth Social. He had a signature formula in which he would write a pithy all-caps headline above a short summary of the article.

He started at 6:25 AM with “YOU’RE NEXT” about a Daily Caller article summarizing a Josh Hawley appearance on Fox News.

He posted a few items about Trump’s legal cases. “These are deeply corrupt Democrats acting in concert to harm one man,” he noted about the Georgia indictment. “Truth by any means is the only path to victory.”

He finished up at 7:48 AM with the last of several posts about trans issues. “Muslim transgender wants balls back,” he wrote.

It was the last thing Biss ever wrote on Truth Social.

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V. Substantially, Objectively True

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What Colloton didn’t know, if indeed he had his eye on killing Sullivan, was just how bad our case would be for that cause. Back in Iowa, we got just about everything we wanted out of discovery: the results of an I-9 audit that NuStar had conducted after my article appeared, an order directing the Social Security Administration to provide us with information about every NuStar employee since 2006, and even some limited information about who might be funding the case.

We had an ex-ICE special agent, Claude Arnold, who was formerly the chief of ICE’s Transnational Gang unit at ICE Headquarters in Washington, DC, review the massive record we had assembled. He produced a devastating expert report that was not made public but has subsequently been unsealed.

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