🆕 Personal Updates
I think most people in tech right now would agree: there’s a lot of anxiety about the exponential pace of AI.
A few days after I sent the January issue, OpenClaw went viral, and just a few days after that Moltbook, then a suite of new features and products from Anthropic and later various viral AI doomer posts resulted in almost $2 trillion in public market caps from tech stocks being shed in just a few days of trading.
The entire week, all I could think about was what was going to happen next. A quote which stuck with me to summarise what we are going through.
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The rate of progress with AI just now is hyperbolic - and as someone in tech both professionally and personally, it’s both exciting and absolutely petrifying at the same time.
There are days I can’t sleep because I can’t wait to wake up and play with a new tool or experiment with a new idea, which AI has enabled or made easier. But there are days when I feel threatened and worried about the global society and its reaction to what is to potentially come.
One thing is for sure: the rate of progress isn’t going to wait for us to come to terms with what’s happening, so we'd better buckle ourselves in for the ride.
Right, let’s get to it - time for this month’s roundup 👇
🔥 Last edition’s top clicked link: The thinking game
🔗 Hyperlinks
Shell game
Remember Startup by Gimlet Media back in 2014? Well, if you don’t give it a listen. For those of you who do, I’ve finally found its modern reincarnation called ‘Shell Game’ hosted and written by journalist Evan Ratliff.
In series 2, Evan tries to build a real startup, run by agents, challenging the general tech sentiment that we will all be managers orchestrating a team of AI agents.
Despite the reality of this being a journalistic experiment for the purposes of creating content for the podcast, it’s both hilarious and educational at times.
P.s I started from season 2 and don’t feel I’ve missed anything.
Soon
Where is the tech subculture media company with that gritty Gonzo-type journalism? Did I ever exist? I have no idea. But if Vice were specifically for technology, it feels like it would be producing content like this fresh new media brand - Soon.
Perhaps the similarities should come as no surprise given its founder, Patrick McGuire is ex-Vice Media.
Soon looks to delve into the machines, minds, and subcultures of tech’s new frontier. Their debut documentary (released earlier this month) featured exclusive access to RainmakerCorp’s weather modification operations (AKA cloud seeding) and their quest to “make it rain” with modified drones. Watch here.
Second up, they spend the day with the infamous Avi Schiffmann and his AI companion wearable - Friend. Watch here.
Personal website discovery
It’s been a while since I’ve discovered a unique personal website. This month, I stumbled upon this gem by Raffi Chillingaryan, which features a working iPhone interface to navigate around his actual phone.
As Raffi mentions:
I think our Home Screen setups say a lot about us
If you're nosy like me, this is a fun site to navigate around while learning why Raffi values each app specifically whilst getting some good app recommendations in the process.
📓 Articles
The Idiot Index for Code
If you’ve been following the tech stock market, you will have likely noticed the devastation that’s unfolded over the past few weeks as the market reacts to what some refer to as SaaS-ageddon (AKA SaaS‑pocalypse), with almost $2 trillion in SaaS stock valuations wiped out. The market is now trying to price in the future of these once‑defensible money‑printing machines against the collapse in AI code‑generation time, taking ideas from sketch to working software in hours instead of weeks.
But despite this collapse in code generation cost and time, should you consider building the software you use in-house and cancel all your subscriptions? Should you spend time building internal software, or use that precious time to focus on your own product?
This is the danger of agentic coding. Making software cheap/easy to make does not mean you should use that capability replacing SaaS subscriptions willy-nilly
In this post, Evan Armstrong uses Elon Musk's Idiot Index algorithm as a means to determine if you should continue paying for the software license, build it yourself or remove it entirely.
The hidden danger of shipping fast
What once was a problem every product engineering team would love to have is now becoming a reality. Shipping software improvements and features too fast!
But is it actually something we need to worry about? The PostHog team suggests we do.
But why is this suddenly becoming a problem? Well, it will come as no suprise this increase in engineering velocity is being driven by AI coding tools, such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, etc.
The PostHog team have been ramping up their shipping velocity using AI and has found challenges in this superhuman ability to ship new features at breakneck speed.
Once you cross a certain threshold, however, product velocity stops compounding and starts competing with itself. You’re no longer constrained by your capacity to ship new things, but by your users’ capacity to adopt them.
Imagine that for one minute. Now the bottleneck is with the users being able to adopt the new features and improvements you're shipping.
Wild concept to grasp, given that the majority of software teams are constantly trying to improve their ability to ship faster. Luckily, bottlenecks have solutions.
In this post, Cleo Lant, outlines their theory of constraint solution(s).
Welcome to the Luxury Era of the Creator Economy
The creator economy has grown up.
For the past decade, the story has been simple: more creators, lower barriers, with a splash of algorithmic distribution. Anyone can publish. Anyone could go viral. The result is a world where content supply is compounding faster than human attention capacity. Audiences are overwhelmed. Differentiation is getting harder, not easier.
However, TBPN have quickly come into the scene with some fantastic examples of differentiation and provides a fantastic example of this “luxury” creator tier.
Jordi Hays and John Coogan host a three-hour live show, five days a week, aimed squarely at a narrow but high-leverage audience of founders, operators, investors, and executives.
If we have 10 million subscribers we’ve pivoted. Something’s gone wrong and we’re not niche enough.
Instead of chasing views, they focus on making one great show and building a sponsorship business that looks more like Formula 1 money than basic YouTube payouts. Together, with fewer partners, deeper relationships, six- and seven-figure annual deals, and a brand that signals insider status.
Despite what might sound like a small audience, from what I’ve found in this post and online, they are set to make $20m in sponsored partner deals in 2026.
As production and distribution keep getting cheaper, creators will increasingly have to choose: are you building for everyone, or building something that means more to a very particular someone?
While this is a somewhat basic article, it highlights the guys at TBPN’s ruthless focus on their niche audience and their ability to avoid getting sucked into a broader mainstream.
If you haven’t tuned in for their live stream or podcast, give it a shot.
The Story of Wall Street Raider
I love a strategy game, even more so when it looks like a nostalgic Bloomberg terminal interface, and I’m allocating fake money.
This is the origin story of Wall Street Raider, perhaps the most obsessive financial sim ever built. However, it almost died, more than once. A wall of ancient BASIC (115,000 lines), a game that accidentally rewired hundreds of careers, and a creator who sometimes couldn’t even fully explain his own code.
At the heart of it is an unlikely duo, consisting of two developers with a 50‑year age gap who only met properly over a video call, yet somehow ended up trusting each other with four decades of work and a game that refused to die.
Multiple companies tried to take on the mammoth task of rewriting the code into something more modern, but all failed. Then, an almost 30-year-old developer decided he wanted to take on the challenge. After figuring out he didn’t need to write the entire game engine, he rebuilt the front end of the game on top of the existing game logic.
But what is this super nerdy game all about? Well, instead of building cities or managing farms, you buy and sell thousands of simulated companies, run hostile takeovers, mergers, restructurings and trade stocks, bonds, options, futures, swaps, ETFs and even crypto. It’s not for everyone, but I’ll be dammed if I don’t give this a shot.
🎁 Bonus content: Ever fancied simulating what it’s like to be a System Engineer? Data Centre is a single‑player simulation and management game about designing and running a physical data centre from scratch.
🆕 Products
SimpleClaw
This month OpenClaw was all that everyone in tech was talking about. It’s taken over my X timeline for weeks, was discussed at length on every podcast I consumed and was all the talk in my work Slack; heck, it’s even being blamed for the tech stock market correction earlier in the month.
For those of you living under a data centre, OpenClaw is the self‑hosted agentic AI assistant you run on your own hardware, with the Mac mini being the device of choice, it seems. You then simply send messages to it via WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and under the hood, it talks to models such as Claude or OpenAI and completes actions for you. For some, that’s a 24/7 personal assistant organising your calendar, responding to emails, and booking your flights, amongst a whole host of other tasks.
But configuring OpenClaw isn’t for the fainthearted and requires a healthy amount of technical ability. So, some genius, 18-year-old Savio, built SimpleClaw, which helps you configure OpenClaw for you, apparently, in just one minute, which so far has hit $27k MRR.
🤡 Fun fact: The European creator and serial entrepreneur, Peter Steinberger, just signed with OpenAI and will continue to keep the project open-sourced and available to all.
🐽 Other links to consume
Free, open-source coaster park builder (100% built in Cursor)
The AI Doc: Or how I became an apocaloptimist (Official Trailer)
How OpenClaw’s Creator Uses AI to Run His Life in 40 Minutes
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Until the next issue,
Sam | @thisdickie 👨💻