🆕 Personal Updates
I’m working on a small side project to get some additional reps in using both Claude Code and Codex. I’ve jumped from various general-purpose developer environments (IDEs and CLIs) over the past few months, trying to find the one that works for me, and I’ve yet to land on one. As a Product Manager, there aren’t any which are geared towards our needs and use cases, which isn’t surprising since many PMs don’t code day-to-day but are only now starting to use products like Claude Code.
I’m still in the very early phases, but I already have a working MVP I use daily and continue to iterate on.
It will initially be a local desktop app for the Mac, as I don’t want to add the complexity of cloud capabilities just yet, and I have no intention to build this into a SaaS product.
It’s an experiment to push myself to build something I absolutely couldn't build with legacy no-code tools.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last edition’s top clicked link: The thinking game
🔗 Hyperlinks
The Untold Chaos Behind a $3 Billion AI Startup Launch
I’ve found another long-form tech doc. It seems like the YouTube algo is finally working to my advantage.
The week before the launch of Replit’s Agent 4, they released a fascinating 52-minute documentary following the final few days of their Agent 3 public launch. The catch? They had just three days before launch, and they ended up rewriting the core architecture. Cue war rooms, bug bashes, engineers monitoring dashboards from yachts, and endless arguments about architecture and API costs.
What I really appreciate is that, underneath the chaos, you see how this kind of product is actually built — the reality that startups are messy despite their slick websites and social media accounts. What comes through is a hacker culture with very little formal structure and a wild demo-first mentality, which I really admire.
DTV | The unpublished Sequoia book
Like a sacred copy of the Facebook “Little Red Book”, this rare, unpublished 70-page book on Sequoia Capital’s founder Don Valentine’s career and the firm’s origins is now available digitally for free. The only two places you can find a physical copy are a hotel in Italy owned by Michael Moritz and Sequoia's offices, until Paolo Perazzo used AI to recreate the book from an old copy he acquired digitally.
It’s riddled with nostalgia. Not for an era I personally experienced, of course, but am privy to through movies and TV shows (e.g. Mad Men). Cue tailored suits, cigars, late boozy lunches and dinners and general opulence.
What’s really fascinating is that the venture capital industry as we know it barely existed in 1972. Only a handful of VC firms and angel investors existed at the time, and the idea of investing in early-stage, yet to turn a profit, unproven technology startups seemed like madness in a time when the modern tech exit playbook was still being written.
It’s a fascinating little book which gives you a fantastic account of the genesis of one of the world’s most successful VC firms.
Fun fact: Sequoia was in the first round of Apple and invested $150,000 in 1978 but divested in 1979 just before their IPO and made $6 million, a 40x return. However, if they held onto that investment, it could be worth north of $150 billion (exc dilution), a 2.5m return multiple on investment. Learn why they exited early in the book.
🎁 Bonus content: If you're yearning for more on the history of Sequoia Capital and Don Valentine, this 2 part episode of the Acquired podcast episode of the Sequoia Capital story is worth a listen.
Claude Code unpacked
If you think you had a bad day, just spare a thought for the unfortunate engineer at Anthropic who exposed the source code for Claude Code in a software update. The leak included 2,000 files and over 500,000 lines of code, which were quickly copied to GitHub, where it was accessible to anyone. But you probably know this already.
What you might not know is that someone has gone and mapped the entire thing, which reverse-engineers the leaked source into a visual walkthrough of how the tool actually works on a slick website.
But the real gold is in the hidden features section. Stuff that’s in the code but not shipped yet. Whether any of these ships is anyone’s guess, but fascinating nonetheless.
📓 Articles
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
The title of this post instantly lured me in. I have no idea what it was about, but I needed to find out.
I feel like I’ve been running an anxiety-induced sprint the past few months, despite AI tools doing more of my tedious day-to-day tasks. It’s the classic case of filling the time saved with more work. Perhaps I’ll get some time back, get a better balance and slow down. Nope! not yet.
And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this.
Like a lot of people, I’m using Claude Code all day, every day. It's genuinely addictive. It’s dopamine-inducing. I’m constantly thinking about what else I can throw at it. What MCP will level up my stack? What prompt am I missing from my CLAUDE.md, what new Skill or plugin can I create or add? It’s never bloody ending.
In this post, Mario has a good old-fashioned rant at the state of agentic coding tools today, his opinionated reality and how we should use them.
The case against personal software
I’ve shared a lot over the past few years about my opinion on ‘personal software’ or ‘DIY software’, both from the no-code and now AI era. However, this is the first time I’ve found such an interesting counter to the point that people will build their own software due to the democratisation of software development with AI tools. In particular, the analogy of book writing. Ben argues that, given literacy was democratised, the tools to write have continually improved, yet not everyone writes books. They prefer to read a good book to write their own.
How many of your friends have written a book? For God’s sake, we even have machines that can write for us now, and still barely anyone writes!
But after thinking about it for way too long over the weekend, I’ve come to the following conclusion. Writing has transformed everything. While we don’t all write books, we produce more writing than ever - from emails, notes, blogs, and social media posts. If vibe-coded software follows the same pattern, instead, it actually supports the personal software thesis: most people won’t build public apps with the SaaS model, but they’ll build small, disposable, personal tools. While we aren’t here yet due to the market penetration of AI and the remaining friction of such tools, I believe more and more of us will create ‘personal software’.
In fact, if you scroll down further, I’ve provided an update on my own personal experimentation.
This isn’t just a coaster
There was a time when I looked forward to elaborate nerdy April Fools ' Day on Product Hunt, Twitter, and Hacker News. However, it’s been a while since I’ve had a good online rummage for some fun pranks. This year, I found a fantastic project by the team from Lusion.
Like most agencies, you need to show your work to build trust with potential clients. However, there is a broad range of sectors to cover, and a client in pharma hasn’t got the same needs as a client in fintech. But how do you get the client if you have no experience? Well, you gotta think out of the box.
The Lusion team needed experience in brand and website design for hardware products, so they set out to create a fictional product and website called ‘Oryzo AI’. I won’t steal their thunder, so check it out for yourself - you won’t be disappointed by their website!
However, in addition to their fictional products website, they are also writing a 7-part series of their process, bringing it to life, starting with Concept and Creative Direction.
🆕 Products
Lighthouses of the Northern Seas
Not the title you expected in this newsletter, eh? Well, hear me out.
If you want to see a great vibe-coded example using the latest AI tools, this is a stunning example of what can be achieved. Lighthouses of the Northern Seas, created by Ethan Mollick, is an interactive map which highlights lighthouses around the world. The attention to detail is incredible - down to the colour of each light, how fast it turns, frequency, brightness and reach.
🎁 Bonus content: Check out another fun vibe-coded project called Git City. More Github commits mean taller buildings, and more repos mean a wider base. Windows with lights on show that you were active recently.
Pool | Save anything with a screenshot
Bear with me, but when you think about it, screenshots taken on your smartphone are one of the largest untapped datasets in the world.
People take billions of them every day, and for the most part, they sit in your photo library completely unstructured and rarely used.
We all do it. You spot a recipe, a product, a place you want to visit, and instinctively take a screenshot. Then it disappears into your camera roll alongside thousands of others you’ll never look at again.
Pool is a new iPhone app trying to fix this. It takes your screenshots and makes sense of them by extracting the useful stuff, finding the original links, and automatically categorising everything into themed collections you can revisit and share with friends.
I haven’t got access yet. If you have an invite code, please do share!
Wabi | The personal software platform
Back in last December’s issue, I mentioned I was waiting for my beta access to Wabi, and I’ve finally got it.
As a reminder, Wabi is an iPhone app where anyone can create, discover, remix, and share mini-apps by simply providing a basic prompt. You describe what you want in plain language (“Build me an app that…”), and Wabi generates a working app for you in minutes with a bunch of ready APIs to connect to. After playing with it for the last week and creating a couple of mini personal apps, I’m pleasantly impressed with the app itself and the output of the apps created.
Wabi’s thesis is that the next step is screen-first, visual mini-apps that anyone can create and share, making software a creative medium like video or music.
Wabi provides the app-building UI, hosting, social layer, and integration plumbing, while the actual AI generation is outsourced to whichever foundation model you select in the settings. They also provide a bunch of APIs for free, just now, which has allowed me to create a neat Kite Surfing app, which pulls in real-time weather data.
🎟️ I’ve got two invites if anyone wants one. First-come, first-served. Just hit reply or message me.
🐽 Other links to consume
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Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻
The idea of slowing down during a product launch is such a necessary counterpoint to the usual chaos. I really like your point about personal software theory.