Founder, Builder, Strategist
Toronto | San Fransisco
Joined December 2008
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- Following3.6K
- Followers2.3K
- Likes9K
We are dealing with the phenomenon of frontier models that aren’t aware of their own improvement or decline from one version to the next.
They get better in some areas and worse in others.
Depending on when you “meet” a model and what you delegate to it, you can walk away with very different impressions.
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A good read for both old and new timers.
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
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Good luck Andrew. This is great to see.
PCBs made in America. Twice as fast as Shenzhen.
Today @CircuitHub is unveiling The Grid, our factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds circuit boards on demand.
No changeovers, no per-design setup. Prototypes and production batches, fully automated.
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Perfect for moving and garage sale inventory! Would be fun to build a Keep / Ditch swipe right left interaction on top of this so you can run through your studs and “does it spark joy?” It all.
I have discovered the the BEST way to get 3D modeling results from LLMs
The app LiDAR scans the room while taking hundreds of high quality photos.
Then a workflow + skill I've created models out every item recursively checking the model against the photo at the exact spot + angle where the photo was captured
The result is a a dimensionally accurate and high quality model of your room
All in my latest video on how to do it youtube.com/watch?v=JGQCcCzu…
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True. Personally I invested a much larger % of my TFSA because Wealthsimple made it the default behaviour in the app.
Canada invented maybe the greatest investment account in the history of money, then named it after a piggy bank.
So now roughly $350 billion is sitting in TFSAs as cash. Doing nothing. Being slowly eaten by inflation.
A small, boring policy idea that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars: change the name. Make it the Tax-Free Investment Account.
It might sound silly, but the name matters. Nearly half of Canadians with a TFSA (sorry, TFIA) keep their savings in it as cash. At Wealthsimple, it’s 6%. Over a few decades, that gap compounds into an enormous amount of money.
One word. Let’s change it, close that investment gap, and actually help Canadians build wealth.
newsroom.wealthsimple.com/th…
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“With AI making code cheap to copy, what's going to be hard to copy is the shape of a company. How a team learns, decides, and ships.”
I think we will see many more “Executive IC” type roles popping up. Experienced free players can move fast, with conviction.
Very stoked about my next adventure. I’ve joined Spellbook, but not as CTO.
I’m joining as an Executive IC. It probably means different things to different people. It means I'm here to build and be hands on in every part of the company.
I've invested and been advising and getting to know @scottastevenson and the team for more than a year. At some point it became obvious the most useful thing I could do was stop talking about ideas and go work with the team.
With AI making code cheap to copy, what's going to be hard to copy is the shape of a company. How a team learns, decides, and ships. That's what I want to work on. It's what I've spent the last three decades learning to do.
Why Spellbook? The world has entered into one of the largest investment cycles in decades. Trillions of dollars are being deployed into energy, AI, manufacturing, transportation and the modernization of critical global systems. Despite this, progress still moves at the speed of contracts. Spellbook’s mission is to modernize the $1 trillion transactional legal market so the contract system can keep pace with the global economy.
At the same time, every contract ever signed is becoming searchable, comparable, and weaponizable by counterparties, regulators, and plaintiffs' lawyers. You will be attacked.
We're hiring. Slight bias toward Canada, but remote-friendly for great talent.
DM me.
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Day 3 of @TOtechweek - as usual, the best part is running into so many friends. #torontotechweek
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There’s no tipping point coming where things flip and the jobs are gone. The new reality is the opposite—the more we automate, the more expert human work there is to do.
We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.
And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.
I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.
After Automation: every.to/p/after-automation
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Key slide from this @gregisenberg conversation:
When output gets cheap, taste gets more valuable. 👌
We’ve seen this cycle before. Everyone has an iPhone, but we don’t have more good photography. A good photo tells a better story.
how to use Google's NEW open source Design.md + AI Skills to make your startup look like a $100 million company in 1 hour:
1. Design.md is an open source file from Google that captures the soul of a design. Typography, colors, spacing, all in one markdown file. You attach it to your prompt and your agent builds beautiful things every time.
2. Think of it this way. The HTML is the finished dish. The design.md is the recipe. The skills are the ingredients. Put them together and everything you build looks consistent and professional.
3. Don't create a design system from scratch. Find a brand you love. Linear, Stripe, Vercel, whatever resonates. Study it. Use ChatGPT or Claude to help you extract the design language into your own design.md file.
4. Build skills on top of your design.md. A landing page skill. A mobile app skill. A motion design skill. A slide deck skill. Each one references the same design.md so everything looks like it came from the same designer.
5. The biggest mistake people make: they nail one screen and then everything else looks generic. Design.md solves this. One file keeps every page, every format, every medium consistent.
6. Use it across everything. Your landing page. Your app. Your pitch deck. Your promo videos. Same DNA. Same taste. Same system. That's what separates a startup that looks real from one that looks vibe-coded.
7. Build a second brain for design inspiration. When you see something beautiful in the real world or online, capture it. Save it. When you're building something new, reference it. Taste is developed, not downloaded.
8. It's obvious but the difference between a product people trust and a product people bounce from is how it looks and feels. Design.md gives you that edge.
you can watch below
youtu.be/oLu32YpiIJw?si=1YoY…
shoutout to @mengto for coming on @startupideaspod and walking through his full workflow.
if you want to use AI to actually build gorgeous designs, you'll want to use see this.
watch
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SPOT ON: You manage your team through the work. You don't just manage people.
Brian on why pure people managers won't survive AI:
"I don't think people that only manage people will have any value in the future.
Everyone's going to have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.
In other words, even the managers need to code. You can't just be these managers where you're people's therapists and you're just doing meetings, just one-on-ones.
People who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive.
That kind of leadership style is not gonna work. You need to have context.
I hear about heads of design, they don't actually manage the design. Johnny Ive manages the design. He designs and he leads people. A design leader who only manages the people that's crazy to me.
The way Frank Lloyd managed his design team is through the work. You don't manage the people, you manage the work.
I think a lot of people will survive this age of AI.
The two types of people that will not survive are pure people managers, and people that are rigid and don't want to change and evolve."
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Upload an image and explore!
Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.
@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)
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Counter prediction: spreadsheet will endure as a deep prompting tool, because conveying the same depth of information via speech will take much much longer.
prediction re the end of spreadsheets
AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness.
think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row.
The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero.
this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure.
The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
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“The Islamic Republic has a monopoly of violence in Iran. They have all the weapons.”
Hence the impossibility of demanding change by the unarmed population and an ever increasing violent response by a militia that literally has no other skills, specially nation building skills.
مکگرک مشاور امنیت ملی چندین رییس جمهور امریکا از یکی از مواجهش با هیئت مذاکره کننده ج.ا میگه.
میگه من ازشون پرسیدم شما که دیگه مردم نمیخوانتون. طرفدار ندارین. چرا ول نمیکنین؟
میگه برگشت گفت ولی ما همه ی سلاح ها رو در اختیار داریم.
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Chef’s kiss
Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….”
The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.
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