I write a newsletter about startups and investing—for ai builders of all levels.

I record mini-tutorials, review tools I’m testing, share my insights and give you a peek behind the digital curtain from an exited founder turned investor.

Hey folks,

back in the uk after a week in SF, and not feeling jet-lagged (yet..)

i have so many thoughts and ideas from the week but many im going to percolate on a bit longer.

but here’s some of my quick thoughts:

• US vs UK mindset. it’s full of optimism and thinking about the future. there’s obviously opportunists in SF but they’re easy to spot. if you meet the right people and have the right conversations there’s so much to be excited in and interested by. if everyone’s drinking the kool aid, i don’t think that’s a bad thing (in moderation). we could use more optimism and founders especially (from friends, family, investors, peers).

• every dinner here is talking about companies, building, ai etc - yes that’s eye-roll for many but for people in the space, its interesting and energising. you come away with ideas, thoughts and more questions

• no one has it figured out. everything is still so new and everyone’s building on the models that change a lot

• most user issues of ai products are down to….you guessed it, model behaviour

• companies customer profiles are very frothy. lots of different people are trying tools, making it harder for teams to spot their true, biggest personas to target.

• overbuilding is happening. the smartest people know this and act accordingly (read: how to not build bad AI software).

• the api business is phenomenal

• you basically have to go around town with curiosity and figure out who you agree/disagree with, get different opinions and decide for yourself

and thats what i did. i went around asking questions, putting my thoughts out there, hearing others and figuring out my view on it all. i had the best time.

thanks to everyone i hung with!

🔎 News worth knowing

• OpenAI is turning its profit branch into a Public Benefit Corporation⁴⁶ (just like Anthropic and xAI). The non-profit board of OpenAI will still control this PBC and be a large (not major) shareholder. Also, OpenAI is likely buying WindSurf¹⁶³ for $3B. (even though i thought it wouldn’t…)

• Apple and Anthropic⁸⁴ are in cahoots to make X Code (Apple’s own IDE) a “vibe coding” app. Also, Claude has web-search access for all paid plans and the web app can now connect to MCP servers via a new feature called “Integrations⁸¹”

• Grok can now create PDFs²²⁴. I really like it for deep research answers because the PDF has an index that makes reading through it easier.

• Visa⁵⁴ and MasterCard⁴³ are making it easier for agents to buy things for you. There’s a tweet showing Visa hiring vibe-coders¹⁴⁷ but its actually hiring engineers that just know the latest tools and how to use them - big difference.

• Lots of AI tools say they can build apps. Gadget’s actually can. It’s a full dev environment + a Shopify-savvy AI assistant that writes code, debugs, connects to Shopify, and ships. If you've tried building Shopify apps, you know that's impressive. No boilerplate. No context switching. Just build¹⁷⁴.*

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🌐 What I’m consuming

• Gemini 2.5 Pro finished the game Pokémon Blue¹⁹⁶. The secret behind gemini’s performance is a good harness. Think of a harness as the app/system where the ai model is plugged in. In this case, the harness provides gemini raw data in addition to images from the game (valid, not cheating).

  • o3 in chatgpt has an amazing harness with many tools—web search, image cropping, running code, etc.

  • Manus is so good because it can read/write documents and get its thinking out of its head.

  The harness is built by the developer based on the "game you want to play” (task to be completed) and makes the ai model significantly more powerful at that game.

• Build a WordPress calculator¹⁹⁹ plugin in 30 mins W/ Cursor, V0, and Google AI Studio, from one of our community 🙌

• Andrej Karpathy’s review⁵⁶⁰ on his latest vibe-coded project

• The rise of Cursor²⁴¹: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using (now valued at $9B)

• A public CEO’s internal email about being an AI-first company⁴⁶⁴

• MCPs enabling better support agents¹⁴⁰ for Intercom

• LLMs code by brute force, we shouldn’t be forcing them into structured code²¹⁴. Let them write whatever code they need to. I’m seeing this convo happen more and more.

• ChatGPT rolled back its ‘overly yes-man’ personality, and reviewed what went wrong¹⁸⁸

• o3 is really good at Harvard Business School cases¹⁶³, and at translating greek poetry⁴⁸. These might be good ideas to build a wrapper—Jenni AI does millions in ARR, helping students write research papers. (and no I’m not stopping using em dashes just coz chatgpt uses them)

• Logan and a Gemini researcher talk about long context in AI models¹¹⁸: RAG, making the whole of it useful, cost and what’s next. tldr for that: cheap long context is coming first, then 10M context, 100M needs more research.

• three highlights about the demand for LLMs⁷⁸ on openrouter - new models get adopted fast, they replace old models as well as expand the market, many apps use multiple models (from different labs too).

• Things Theo loves/hates about every AI model API²¹³.

• Tips for prompting to get good and accurate design⁴⁹⁶ from AI models.

⚙️ Tools I’m tinkering with

• Supermemory MCP³⁶⁶ (Im an investor) - memory that you can take to any LLM

• Dash²⁴⁸ lets you connect apps and take actions across them using plain english

• Clova³⁵¹ - like Cursor for video editing

• generateads.ai²²⁵ creates ads with just your website and ChatGPT’s image API

• Executive assistant³³² by Langchain³³² - an agent as your assistant

• Opencode⁹⁹ - a terminal-based AI tool

• clickrepeat^273† - lets you record your screen and automate repetitive tasks

• Preswald¹⁴⁶ - Build interactive data apps with AI

• Klavis¹³⁷ - MCP integration for ai apps

• VectorVFS¹²⁴ - your filesystem as a vector database

🍦 Afters

• Claude and Gemini are the most popular models on Cursor⁸¹. o3 is growing fast

• LLM summaries might actually promote reading¹⁴¹

• someone built their resume as an MCP^232† server

• The AI job crisis^506†

• The best AI coding tools³²⁹ to use in 2025

• Coding is becoming more like writing²²³ vs building

• related: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering¹⁷⁶

That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋

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