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You're probably wondering how I ended up here I'm the founder of memelord.com and I'm known as the "unhinged marketing guy". So all I'm saying is this is NOT gonna be your normal boring marketing predictions. Here's my 2026 marketing trends predictions on: gambling, degeneracy, vibe coding, patriotism, Timothee Chalamet, memes, guns, movies, and sex (read until end for Sydney Sweeney ads): # #1: Rise of the “Marketing Engineer” No-code → $100k ARR → $3M Seed Round I built memelord.com to $100K ARR and then raised $3M all without knowing how to code. Let me say this first before you do: I am NOT unique!! I think we'll see a lot more people like me in 2026: marketers who have good taste and distribution hacking together software. With AI and vibe coding tools getting better every day, marketers are able to ship their ideas they usually would’ve needed engineers for. Every marketer on my team is vibe coding tools and prototypes. At this point, it's a requirement for being on my marketing team. Marketers ship. No excuses. If my dumb ass can do it, so can you. Teams will get smaller as expectations rise of each individual employee. While I still don't know how to actually code, I spent this Christmas drinking coffee and learning Cursor and even CTO said I’m cooking: Got Cursor and also a new suit for Christmas Expect to see a lot more crazy marketers like me making software and raising money this year. # #2: Resurgence of Movie Marketing Everybody knows that movie theaters have been falling due to streaming. But this year, I think we'll see a resurgence in movie marketing in 2 big ways: ## Timotheé Chalamet is going 10,000% hard Between his "I want to be one of the greats" speech and his legendary Marty Supreme marketing run, actors are feeling inspired and envious of Chalamet. This is good for movie lovers. I expect actors to start trying harder in their movies and marketing like madmen just to keep up with Chalamet. It's like Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile barrier. Nobody knew an actor could market and perform like this. Now that we know it, it sets the pace for everybody else. Competition is good for movies just like it is for business And before you go saying, "Oh, Timothee Chalamet can't save Hollywood," let me remind you, he is Lisan al-Gaib…. ## Letterboxd is on the rise. What is LetterBoxd? It's a movie review site mixed with a social network. And here is their organic traffic over the last 5 years.... Letterboxd organic growth via AHREFS Why is Letterboxd growing? Here's the weird true answer. Writing movie reviews is the flex for over-educated under-fulfilled people In today's world where people's attention spans suck and everyone is doomscrolling slop, people are seeing the act of watching movies and writing reviews about them as a form of fulfilling "deep work". Before TikTok, sitting around and watching movies was lazy for stoners. Now it's a form of deep work and practiced focus. Letterboxed is a hedge against brainrot and degeneracy. Have we fallen off as a society? Absolutely man. But hopefully we get some good movies from this. # #3: “Shorting degeneracy” → $$$ The existence of long degeneracy implies the existence of short degeneracy. An essay recently went viral on Twitter about being “long on degeneracy”. The idea: We have a gambling epidemic in America on the rise. Screen time addiction is through the roof. And oh yeah, AI girlfriends are here. While many entrepreneurs are building in the long degeneracy space, I think we'll see billions of dollars created in the “short degeneracy” space. For every problem degeneracy creates, there is a solution to be made. I expect a lot of funding in these categories this year and apps by solo hackers who are fucking around solving their own problems. # #4: Pro-Americana Branding is in Last July 4th, I boycotted the energy drink Celsius to change their name to Fahrenheit because "America fuck yeah" Boycott Celsius 2025 I think we're going to see a lot more Pro-Americana branding like this this year. Being a patriot is officially cool again (it always was). But now it's safe. Brands are already leaning more into Americana. With the 2026 Olympics coming up, Ralph Lauren already dropped their collection. I'm seeing it around New York, people wearing Ralph Lauren Americana proudly that they wouldn't a decade ago. Ralph Lauren 2026 Olympics If you believe that fashion is at the forefront of culture like I do, then expect other brands to follow like lemmings. Speaking of lemmings... # #5: Next president is a memelord At first, it was just Trump and the right posting memes. But Gavin Newsom and the Democrats are learning…. I'm not going to say I fucking called it, but I fucking called it. Here's an article about me in Slate from August referring to Gavin Newsom's memeing. via Slate Newsom is leaning into being self-deprecating and unhinged humor. Self-deprecating humor from a handsome motherfucker never fails His team must have hired some memelords because they are posting some unhinged shit on the cusp of the internet. Newsom hates Trump so much yet he wants to be him so bad. He'll never be as funny, but he can be crueler and hotter. In fact, the scariest part about Newsom to me is that he's so goddamn hot. My wife knows Newsom is evil, but even she thinks he's hot. For fuck's sake, I even think he's hot. It's terrifying. And speaking of sex appeal.... # #6.9: A lot more sex ads Good genes. Okay, now the moment you've all been waiting for. Throughout the entire history of marketing, sex was a huge part of it. It's literally called "sexvertising". Sex sells. Everyone knows this. And then America got extremely politically correct and suddenly it was fat non-binary people on billboards for a weird 3 years. Well, it turns out fat non-binary people don't sell hot girl's lingerie very well. And now everyone's on Ozempic and skinny and feeling sexy. Add in the fact that the political climate is leaning towards based anti-cancel-culture and what happens? You get boobs back in ads. Hell yeah, brother. American Eagle woke up to this and hired Sydney Sweeney. And instead of caving like a little bitch to every critique, the brand and Sweeney doubled down. More sex ads in 2026. memelord.com, bangers only # The 2026 Meta: The most entertaining thing is the most likely. The world trends towards entertaining. When Elon tweeted this, most people thought it was a joke. But he wasn't joking. The rise of gambling. The rise of presidents posting memes. More sex. Etc. The most entertaining thing is the most likely. If you want your brand to be the most likely to win, then you have to be the most entertaining. It is the beginning of the age of memetic warfare, and that is why we are building memelord.com. Wait wtf is Memelord???? "Canva of memes"? You mean "Canva on crack"? Memelord.com is "Google Trends for memes" mixed with "Canva on crack". If you want to stay up to date with marketing trends, join the 1000s of CMOs and social media managers at public companies and unicorns using memelord.com. Happy New Year Cheers to many new memes. Jason "The Memelord" Levin
2025 will go down as the year code became cheap and programming changed forever. With agentic development tools—Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI—engineers can produce far more code than ever before: prototypes, analysis scripts, migrations, refactors, bug fixes, tests, docs, and glue. But that doesn’t automatically translate into shipped value. In 2026 we’ll see the split: organizations that can adapt their processes and tooling to validate and deploy this new flood of changes will compound their advantage, while everyone else bottlenecks in review, testing, and release. The reason is simple: once coding speed jumps, everything around it becomes the constraint. Your throughput gets capped by whatever is slowest—clarifying requirements, reviewing changes, validating correctness and performance, getting to production safely, and operating what you shipped. In 2026, the great engineering divergence will be determined by who raises that ceiling end-to-end. Based on the pace of the last year, it’s reasonable to expect a few more major capability jumps from each lab in 2026: better tool use, more reliable instruction following, and longer usable context. I used most of the different models and agentic tools as they shipped, and I felt the shift firsthand—less “I’m writing code” and more “I’m directing work.” At this point, I expect most new code in many orgs to be AI-generated, with humans increasingly setting intent and validating outcomes. The most effective software teams at the end of 2026 will be wildly more productive than even the most effective software teams from the beginning of 2025. In less than 24 calendar months we'll have gone from one paradigm for software development to a new one that yields vastly more software than before. A single developer with multiple agents running in parallel paired with a software delivery process optimized for agentic development will run circles around everyone else. Although the rise in team productivity inequality will be driven in some small part by variance in individual adoption and effectiveness with AI, it will mostly be driven by the organization's ability to take advantage of every developer suddenly getting the ability to produce 10x to 1,000x more code than at any point before. Individuals may slowly adopt the tools, but by the middle of next year the cacophony of voices exclaiming how they're able to do so much more than before will be impossible to ignore. Amdahl's Law rules everything around me Amdahl's Law states that "the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used." For those of us working on performance improvements in software systems (like InfluxDB), we're intimately familiar with this concept and use it to prioritize what optimizations to work on. Looking at software delivery, you could break it down into a number of things that have to happen: requirements gathering and customer feedback, writing issues, designs and specs, writing code, peer code review, performance testing and UX validation, safe production deployment, and monitoring the result. Code is only one aspect of this pipeline. If coding is 20% of the end-to-end cycle, making it 10x faster only yields ~1.25x overall speedup. To get 10x end-to-end, you have to speed up review, validation, release, and ops—not just typing. Put more succinctly: almost no organization's existing software delivery process is capable of taking in 10x more code produced by their developers. The code they produce will be put into the pipeline and they'll wait around for the slower parts to get it through. It is now possible to produce more code than you'd ever have time to review closely. This is likely why you'll see estimates of developers saying they're 20-50% more productive. My guess is that if their software delivery pipeline could take it, they'd be 10x, 100x or more productive. But they can't, so for many developers in 2026, their lives will simply get easier. They'll get a little bit more done in far less time and spend more time on UX, customer discovery, and higher-leverage work. For those who have doubts about all this, I'd suggest paying attention to what happens with the YC batches from Fall 25, Winter 26, and Spring 26. Anecdotally, a number of founders report that nearly all the code for the companies in this latest batch was written by AI, despite these companies having programmers in their founding teams. And because these are brand new companies with small new teams, they don't have processes in place to gate what gets done, by who and how quickly. It means they can apply AI force to optimize every part of software delivery, not just the code itself. If it’s mostly slop, you’ll see high churn: flaky systems, slow iteration despite lots of PRs, and customer trust issues. If it’s real, you’ll see tighter loops: faster experiments, faster fixes, and surprisingly robust systems for the team size. How to think about software development in 2026 Organizations that update their processes to improve the non-code chokepoints will reap the largest rewards. Specific focus on how to improve: • review bandwidth / ownership • testing and validation • release/rollback confidence • security/compliance gates • product decision latency (what to build next) The software delivery process should be updated to be accessible by agents. Software pipelines with these properties will be easier for agents to work in: • deterministic tests + fast local runs • “one command” dev environment • crisp module boundaries • docs colocated with code, and how to change X directions • golden datasets + perf harnesses • agent accessible observability across CI, performance, deployment and production The tooling can be iterated on with agents and it will quickly become obvious where they get tripped up and what they need to get the context in their window to solve problems. It'll be a lot of work, but thankfully, I'm guessing that the AI agents of 2026 will be able to help with all of this.
Here's how I'm coding with AI lately, might be helpful! 1. I write code primarily using agents, using models like Opus 4.5 and Codex Max for long-running tasks or tricky bugs, and Composer for frontend changes or fast updates (I still review the code). 2. Most of my web dev work happens inside the integrated Cursor browser. This is similar to using the Playwright or Chrome MCPs. Cursor can access network requests, console logs, and send elements on the page to the agent. It can also control the browser! Which can be fun for having it do automated testing: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1999147953609736464… 3. I start projects pretty simple: no upfront rules, commands, or anything. As the project grows, I end up adding the most minimal versions needed. Some examples in this thread: https://x.com/leerob/status/2006043265817071926… 4. I heavily review all the code! Just because I'm using agents, I'm still thinking deeply about the architecture and code quality. I review the code in three passes: first, while the agent is generating it. Second, using the in-editor "agent review" before I push a PR (similar to a custom /code-review command). And finally, using Bugbot (AI code review) on my PRs. This combination helps me fix a lot of silly bugs before I ask other people to take a look at the code. 5. I always start new features with a plan (using Plan Mode). This helps significantly and I would highly recommend planning first regardless of what tool you use. I do like the Cursor UX for visualizing, editing, and saving the plans. You can view some of my plans here: https://github.com/leerob/pixo/tree/main/.cursor/plans… 6. For really hard bugs, I use Debug Mode. It automatically instruments your app with logging, and then asks you to reproduce the issue. The agent then reads the logs and has much more helpful context to pinpoint the root cause. It also comes up with multiple theories on what the issue could be, and works through each one until it's fixed. Has been pretty helpful: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1998821350333440133… 7. Always make sure you give coding agents verifiable outputs! They can't fix what they don't know about. For this, I would prefer using typed languages, and set up tools like linters and good tests. These are normal software engineering best practices, but they matter more than ever. There's also newer tools here like tsgo and biome/oxlint and bun which make dev really nice. Worth trying some of those if you do web dev. 8. I use Cursor from mobile! There's really two modes here: quick bug fixes or really big tasks. Quick bug fixes, I just pop open http://cursor.com/agents and fire away, knowing I'll get back a PR that will work 99% of the time and I can merge away. Easier than writing it down on a todo list, my PR queue is now that list. For big tasks, again I start with a plan and then I give the agent an ambitious goal (that is verifiable!). This allows the agent to run for much longer. It will keep going until it hits that goal, and if it gets lazy, you can just say "keep going" and go back to what you were doing. This is all in the cloud, in remote sandboxes, so I don't have to worry about my local machine. 9. Since someone will ask about the theme... yes I'm rocking light mode most of the time, using Cursor Light here Oh and if you're a car person... more on my car below soon
I still don’t think the San Francisco real estate market has fully priced in That the *average* stock compensation for OpenAI employees is $1.5MM *per year*
2026 is the GREATEST time to build a startup in 30 years I’m 36. I’ve sold 3 startups, helped build companies that raised billions, and backed teams from seed to unicorn. 20 MEGA shifts that make this the BEST time to build in a GENERATION: 1. Hardware got smart. Download open-source AI models from HuggingFace to cheap robots and they're suddenly smart. Opens up tons of use-cases. 2. SaaS is imploding. AI can replicate $500K software for pennies. Enterprise software that took 30 engineers now requires 1 and a Claude Code subscription. Founders will go more niche and more custom and outprice incumbents. 3. Outcome-based pricing is eating subscriptions. With AI agents handling work automatically, founders can guarantee results instead of selling features. This creates a massive arbitrage opportunity to steal market share from rigid subscription models. 4. Vibe marketing is the new marketing. AI agents/tools like Lindy, Gemini and Claude Code Using agents to do personalized outreach, ads and content creation it’s getting good. This is like getting on social in 2005. 5. Social is FYP-ified. Distribution no longer requires massive followings, just content that hits. Founders can build audience from zero without ads and then convert them to owned media channels (text/email). 6. Interfaces are vanishing. Conversations are replacing dashboards across industries. This removes training barriers and means customers can use sophisticated products immediately. 7. Companies are obsessed with efficiency and cutting costs right now. Corporate budgets are getting reallocated to AI. Companies are cutting traditional software spend to make room for AI-powered alternatives. This creates fast-tracked approvals for startups delivering 10x efficiency. 8. 99% of MVPs won't need VC. Low-cost MVPs combined with creator partnerships and AI automation allow bootstrapped scaling. For most software businesses, outside funding is now unnecessary. 9. Global teams. You don’t need to hire in your own city anymore. Opens up tons of arbitrage opportunities and ways to create products unlike before. 10. Millions of creators want to get paid. If you have the right product, the right network of creators, you can hit scale insanely efficiently. Never before did this exist. Next gen founders are building startups community first, software second. 11. Prototyping is nearly instant. With Lovable, Rork etc, you can test ideas in days, not months. MVP speed is basically 1x/week. This creates room for multiple products from small companies (multipreneurship), helps get to PMF faster, 12. LLM APIs create building blocks weekly. I can’t even keep up with how many new APIs/tools coming out from LLMs weekly. Example: Nano Banana pro comes out, probably 1000 ideas built on top of that can be $5M/year businesses. 13. $1m+ revenue per employee. With the leverage of LLMs, community and agents, employees are way more efficient. It won’t be uncommon to generate $1m per employee. This will lead to a rise of "multipreneurship", small teams owning multiple products /businesses. Holding companies will be as common as startups. 14. Superniche is the new niche. Because costs to create software startups is 1/100th, you can service little niches (i call them superniches) and still have a life-changing business. 15. Mobile app ecosystem about to 10X. 2 reasons. First is, adding AI to apps make apps more useful. More useful apps, make more money. Second, 16. Compliance and boring workflows are suddenly buildable. Permits, audits, insurance, payroll edge cases, filings, RFPs. These were “too annoying” for startups before. Agents thrive on rules, checklists, and repetition. The least sexy problems now have the best unit economics. 17. Claude Code killed the “engineering bottleneck.” The constraint is no longer “can we build it,” it’s “do we understand the workflow deeply enough.” The winning founders are ex-operators who encode tribal knowledge into agents. Code is cheap. Taste + domain insight is scarce. 18. The long tail of software is now profitable. Niches that capped at $200k ARR can clear $5M with near-zero marginal cost. 19. Services are quietly becoming software. Manual agencies are one agent away from product margins. 20. if AI can replicate $500K software for $20/month, what’s your moat? distribution, customer service, brand, data etc. REALLY good time to be a world class designer/marketer. (and even more.... but this is getting long already!) We've entered the rarest of windows... when multiple technological shifts collide at once, creating a brief period where small teams can build things that were previously impossible. THE FUTURE OF BUILDING STARTUPS IS DIFFERENT. I know this... This unique moment won't last forever. Markets will adapt. Giants will respond. The window will close. But right now, a founder with clear vision and bias for action can build more in six months than was previously possible in years. (note: if you need an idea to get creative juices flowing, grab one at @ideabrowser) The next generation of great companies is being created right now, many by founders you've never heard of. Some by people who would never have had a shot in previous cycles. That's the beauty of these rare windows. The playing field briefly levels, and the future belongs to those who see it clearly and move first. It's a sacred time, don't bookmark/share this, build something in 2026, will ya? Happy building, my friends. 2026 is yours. Am I wrong?
This is my only strategy for X: 1. do cool stuff 2. talk about it I spend 1.5h a day on here, 1h in the morning and 0.5h in the evening. I enter with purpose and a goal to produce more than I consume. And I only use X on my computer, never my phone. What a year.
How do we make codebases that are agent ready? At @aiDotEngineer, our CTO @EnoReyes breaks down why agents need tight verification loops to succeed, and why most codebases don’t provide those signals yet. Teams that invest in agent readiness will see 5–10× returns.
Trying to write more in 2026? I finally have an AI tool to recommend! It's the only thing I've tried that truly feels like a smart co-author. It writes in your style, has taste, and will even do research on your behalf. It's called @TrySpiral. Here's how it works
Here are my 2026 predictions for how AI will change software: - An agent-native software architecture. Most new software will just be Claude Code in a trench coat—new features are just buttons that activate prompts to an underlying general agent. - Designers get superpowers—and become superstars. When software is cheap to build, designers become powerful. They can finally make anything they want without waiting on engineers—and if you can make a beautiful experience you’ll stand out in a sea of vibe coded apps. - Agentic engineering becomes a new discipline. There is a new skill of software engineering emerging that is different from vibe coding and different from traditional engineering that uses AI. It is truly AI native engineering from professional developers who don’t ever look at or write code. They’ll be the most productive category of engineer in 2026, it will become a new discipline in itself. - AI training that indexes on sense of self. To achieve true autonomy, AI agents will need to run for long stretches of time without constant supervision—and to this end, we’ll see new training approaches that focus on giving agents their own sense of self, goals, and directions—we’ll start to hit the limits of people-pleasing, sycophantic AIs. Want more? I sat down with @every COO @bran_don_gell to trade our 2026 predictions and reflect on @every’s banner year. If you want to know what comes next watch below. Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:05 Reflections on Every’s growth over the past year: 00:01:34 What changes when a company grows from 20 people to 50: 00:09:38 How “agent-native architecture” will change software in 2026: 00:11:55 Why designers are slated to become power users of AI: 00:17:13 The new kind of software engineer that will direct AI agents: 00:23:24 Why the next wave of AI training will focus on autonomy: 00:33:42
2025 has been an awesome year for Lovable. Here's what's top of mind for me right now: AGI will be a software system, not just a large language model. Over the coming year, there are only a few places in the world that can build this system. I started Lovable because I knew we had a chance to be one of them, and to ensure that when AGI exists, it's a world where human creativity remains important. For us to succeed, the thing I care most about is the team. How we work together. Inspire each other. Who we bring on. The problem we're solving has no playbook. Every week we're making decisions that have never been made, shipping things that have never existed. That requires people who can operate in uncertainty and move fast anyway. This is why we systematically hire people who can build something from nothing. Very often previous founders, who have run their own company and know what it feels like to make hard calls with incomplete information. To feel the weight of it and keep going. That instinct is hard to teach. I'm especially interested in people who are currently having the time of their life running their own company. That experience is exactly what's valuable as we build AGI here in Stockholm, with some some of the most exceptional and fun people to be around in the world. If you want to help, I'd love if you send me an email at founders@lovable.dev with who I should talk to. You're welcome to name yourself in the email. Ideally include 1-3 bullets on what they've been passionate about and what almost impossible things they've done. I'm excited to get to know you. Maybe partner or even work together.
I've spent 3 billion tokens in four months. Every single one through a terminal, watching an agent write code I couldn't write myself. You may class me as a 'vibe-coder'. But I think that term overlooks any kind of skill involved in the work itself. Much like 'no-code' did circa 2019 (when I started my no-code education company later acquired by Zapier). I don't read the code. But I read the agent output religiously. And in doing so, I'm picking up a ton of knowledge around how code works, how projects work, where things fail, where they succeed. That's my version of learning to program. The new technical class. ## What I've actually shipped A few things I've actually shipped in these last few months: **Personal Site.** I revamped my personal site and made it look like a terminal CLI tool and it was so much better than my previous attempt at the start of this year. **Feed.** I built a simple social tracker for mentions of Factory on Twitter, posts from our subreddit, and GitHub issues. It's open-source and I've gotten 100+ stars on it with several folks cloning for themselves. **Factory Wrapped.** I built the first version of our 'wrapped' product. Showed it to the team and they loved it, so they wanted to bake it into the actual product itself, which is now live. Adding new guides, rearranging things. This wouldn't technically feel like coding, but to me it is. It's still the same process. **Custom CLIs.** I've created a few CLIs—like a Pylon CLI which then has been picked up by the team to help with customer support queries. I built a CLI to help users with adding tokens to their accounts. Plus a Linear and Gmail CLI. **A crypto tracker.** I invested in a co that accurately predicts positive, negative or neutral signals in dynamic data (financial, weather, fitness, protein folding). So I built a tracker that automatically opens and closes short/long positions based on the predictions - kinda like a mini-hedge fund. **Droidmas.** Twelve days, twelve experiments or games that touched the different themes people are talking about on Twitter—memory, context management, vibe coding, things of that nature. **An AI-directed video demo system.** Effectively, I give it a prompt to create a video. It opens up ghostty, runs the commands, can open other windows like a browser, records the screen. Acts as its own director, producer and editor. The agent itself is watching what's happening during the recording and can respond as and when things happen. If there's an issue or a bug or it needs to wait for a response, it will do that. I used this to create a video that was posted by OpenAI. **A Telegram bot powered by Droid Exec** so I could have my local repos synced on a VPS and just chat to my repos as a chatbot. I try to as closely mimic the CLI experience but from a messaging app (I dislike Telegram but couldn't be bothered with the arduous Whatsapp for Business setup). And about 50 other things I'm not mentioning or have been left to die. ## How I actually work I use a CLI exclusively. Terminal over web interfaces, always. It's just more capable as a general agent, and I get to see it work. I may have an idea for something, or a pain, or there's an issue with something that I feel like could be solved with code (basically everything these days). So I'll just spin up a new project in Droid (Factory's CLI). I generally just talk to the model a couple of times to start feeding in context about what I'm trying to do, then I'll switch into spec mode to start getting a plan going on what I wanna build. In spec mode I'll basically question a bunch of things. Like I don't understand what this is, or why would we need that over this, can't we do it this way? I'll link docs and GitHub repos for the agent to explore. Then I let Opus 4.5 with autonomy high just rip. I'll watch the stream, see what's happening, and when there are any errors. I may jump in to question it or guide it down a different path. I start the server, test it, give feedback and iterate. So I kind of build ahead of myself first. I try and just build the thing. And then all of the gaps and all of the issues that I run into are the opportunities for me to learn. Is that a thing that is part of the system that I've seen across other repos that I should build up a sort of templated system to handle? Should this go into an agents.md that actually follows me around and does the same thing on all of the other repos I'm going to be working on? ## My agents.md setup I've been spending more time trying to figure out the best agents.md setup for myself because this is effectively like the instruction manual. I've got a repos folder locally—that's where all my coded projects go. In that repos folder is an agents.md that says to explicitly set up each new repo with what to do and not to do, how to do things with GitHub, how to commit, all that kind of stuff. And whether it should use my work GitHub account or my personal GitHub account. Running tests. End-to-end tests is one of these things I never really paid attention to previously. But now I'm really keen to have end-to-end tests on everything. Given my current knowledge and capability, when I'm building things and testing them, there often might be silly bugs that I just should have caught or tested had there been tests in the first place. And I often look at others' agents.md files to see what I can borrow for my own. I'm constantly trying to improve my doc to make each and every new working session smoother. ## Coding on the go I'm also making sure that I install the Droid GitHub app on every repo that I create. So when I'm deploying to GitHub, I make sure I'm submitting pull requests so I can have Droid review it—and I can tag Droid to make fixes itself with a custom prompt. I can trigger it from issues or from pull requests. It lets me code from my phone, and add new things when I'm out and about. That in combination with my Telegram bot makes it really easy for me to do things when I'm not at my desk. I also use Slack with my agent. I create a new channel for each repo and just fire off things as and when. I often spin up new channels for new ideas. Slack's a great 1-person product (+ agent(s)). ## What I've been learning **Bash commands.** It really clicked for me when I'd been running the changelog process for a while—it's the same process over and over. I finally understood the 'workflow'. So I got droid to create the slash command flow and it's the first slash command that I actually have used properly, which runs a number of bash commands and also prompts the model to do certain things like reading through GitHub diffs, checking what is behind a feature flag and what's not, putting things into the right sections of new features, bug fixes, that kind of thing. From there I started getting more into bash + cli's. I've stopped using MCPs—I use the CLI versions of most things over MCPs. Yes, because MCPs take up context but mostly I feel like it's simpler - I usually only need a few of the tools an MCP would include. So with Supabase, Vercel and Github, I'm always using the CLI's over the MCP's. I often build my own CLIs for things. For example, I built my own Linear CLI so I could query my own issues and run everything from the terminal instead of going to the desktop or web interface. **VPS.** I abstractly knew what it was—it's like another computer that is on all the time somewhere else. But until I truly needed one I didn't really know what I needed to do there, and there's still a lot I need to learn. But effectively, now when I'm running the crypto tracker, I have a ton of data that's being pulled every single minute and I need that to always stay on. I also use the VPS when using my Droid Telegram bot and use something called SyncThing to sync my local repos to my VPS so that my repos are always up to date and they're in the same state as I left it. So I can just pick it up on the go. **Skills.** I've tried to use them a bit more. I've been using them not only just as knowledge, but also with bash commands + CLIs. I've got a Gmail CLI that I can pull into any projects, it's portable, it lives at my root directory. So anytime I need Gmail in my system—I've got a Gmail triage system that I use—it just uses the CLI. ## The new programmable layer of abstraction Not to be like everyone else on Twitter when they see Andrej Karpathy tweeting something, but this really rang true to me: **there's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master.** When it was the no-code days, the abstraction layer that I was mastering was drag and drop tools like Webflow, Zapier, and Airtable—stitching them together and making it feel like real software (until you hit a limit). But now instead of me thinking I've got to learn to write code from scratch in order to be able to do all of this, what I need to learn is actually **how to work with an AI agent.** How can I prompt it well? How can I make sure it's got the right context? And also how can it help me understand what we're doing, how do the pieces work together, how can I improve my own system over time? Including all of the things like agents, subagents, prompts, context, memory, skills, hooks, etc. ## Learning from others I read people like Peter Steinberger who is an *actual* programmer and is shipping a ton like crazy. And seeing in his posts almost the simplicity of his system, where he just talks to the model, lets it do its thing, doesn't really worry about extra slash commands, subagents, hooks, skills(although he's coming round to skills) - this just gives me permission and confidence that I don't need some ultra complex system. Looking at Twitter you see a lot of people really optimising or potentially over-optimising their own system. That can feel daunting for folks like me, but also that's what I think some of the beauty of this is: it's a completely customizable system, so you can make it work for you however you'd like it to work. You can have a plan mode that you create with a custom slash command that runs for twenty minutes like Kieran does, or you can just talk to the model like Peter does. Another thing while following other engineers is seeing their open source software, cloning it, using it myself, trying to improve it, or just taking parts of it and making that my own. Like Peter's recent summarize YouTube for example, I just took it, removed the Chrome extension part, kept it as the CLI, and now I can just talk to that anywhere I want to. And like Mario, reading things like his MCP post where he talks about CLIs over MCPs, gave me the nudge to dive in more to bash and CLIs. ## The learning process I'm not building things for tens of thousands of people to use in production. So there are going to be bugs, there are gonna be issues, and I run into them plenty. And it's just a reminder that this is a gap in your knowledge, not in the capability that you have now. My role is identifying the gaps or finding those gaps and thinking: how do I make sure this never happens again? Or how do I make sure I understand this part of the system enough that if it's gonna happen again, I'll catch it. Even the simplest things from when I first started using agents to code—like, why can't I use GitHub Pages when I've got dynamic data and I want multiple users to be able to use something? That's a very, very simple thing that programmers know. But it was something I just learned because I was building something, I was trying to build something different than the tools allowed me. So then I said, okay, so what do we need to do? Like all you need to do is just ask the model. The model knows everything that you don't. You can just keep asking it. **It's your ever patient, over-your-shoulder, expert programmer.** You can add in your agents.md "I am not a programmer, you need to explain things very simply for me." You can just tweak it exactly how you want to. ## Contributing to real products I've even contributed improvements to our own product—some simple things, but improvements nonetheless. There's a team of engineers at Factory that are extremely experienced and good at what they do, and I'm learning a lot by just watching them, looking at their PRs. We have internal lunch and learns where people say "this is how I scope new product features", "here's how I bug fix", things like that, which have been really helpful. So this whole thing is just a really big learning experience for me, and I'm really enjoying learning "to code", or, learning to work with code. ## Why this is different I've tried to learn to code many times in my life, and every time it was type in these characters, hit enter, and do you see hello world? It was kind of do this, then that, then this happens. And maybe it would have been helpful for me to learn all that, but I just still think that's so different to what it is today. For me to be able to build the things I've built now, if I'd taken that other path, I would have had to code for many months, many years to get to a point where I could feel like I could write the code myself. So instead I'm coming at it from a point of view of I understand systems thinking for projects built with code. I accidentally learned that when I was running my last company with no-code education. You're still learning that okay, Webflow is the front end, Zapier is the API routes, the connective tissue, the data flows, and Airtable is your database. So I learned the systems of that previously, and I think that's helping me today understand some of those pieces. There is so much you can learn. And often I'll see something that someone posts on Twitter and I'm like, I have no idea what that is or what I can do with it, but I'll bet you I can play around with it. **No piece of software feels unattainable.** I can just git clone it and say, what the hell does this thing do? Okay, I've been thinking about this—is this thing gonna do anything related to what I thought? And it's just all exploration. It's so much fun. ## Asking the "silly" questions There have been countless times where I think about silly questions—to me or silly questions that other programmers would never ask—that I have the permission to ask, because there's no one watching me and no one shooting me down for being stupid or saying the wrong thing. Like, why do we use all these frameworks, these different types of frameworks? Because they are abstractions for humans writing code. So why—if an LLM is super smart—why couldn't it just be simpler code written, less dependencies, less potential surface areas for bugs? Is that a silly thought or a good thought? And I can learn that it might not be a silly thought. But okay, yes, there are these many projects that the model has been trained on, which is why often things will be built in certain frameworks. So it's just building up this understanding of the code world, the engineering world that I didn't deserve to be in, but I'm absolutely part of now. ## Beyond "vibe coding" Yes, you can call it vibe coding, but I think vibe coding misses the point. I'm trying to actually learn the systems. I'm trying to really understand what is going on, how can I improve, how can I be a new age programmer, what is this new technical class? That's what I think is the most interesting thing here. I can't categorically call myself non-technical but I also can't call myself a programmer. Nor would I want to. **I'm part of this new technical class and I don't know what it's called.** But I think vibe coding gives a negative connotation to it, much like no-code gave a negative connotation to that group. ## It feels like a game Some people have likened this new way of programming to a game. Factorio is the one that people talk about. I've never played it. I'm not much of a gamer. But this whole paradigm feels like a real game to me, and the output is I'm building stuff that I want to build. A ton of things just don't end up anywhere on GitHub. They don't end up live. They are just mere explorations of parts of a system or a topic. Others end up published and other people use it - I had a CTO fork my personal site and use it for himself! Big boss stuff (for me!) If someone posts "oh, I built this React grab tool for example". Okay, cool, can I build my own? Like why? This one looks really good. Well, just because I want to. I can just explore things for the sake of exploring things. **Every idea you've ever had can be exercised, can be explored, and it doesn't need to be good.** And you'll learn along the way. ## Permission to throw things away Previously, if I'd learnt to code to build a really crappy version of something I was thinking of, like a big idea that I had, and then no one wanted it, I'd be too emotionally invested in that idea to be able to just throw it away. With no-code, I could effectively build a version of that big idea in an hour, a couple of hours, a weekend. And if no one liked it, no one wanted to pay for it, it was rubbish, then I could just throw it away. It wasn't that much of my time or my energy into something that ultimately wasn't going to be something good for someone else. And I feel like the same is true today. We're gonna see an explosion of software. Many of it won't be good, but lots of it is already great. There are expert programmers who are shipping things like absolute crazy that are all good projects. So we're just gonna have this absolute plethora of coded projects out there that you can use, clone, tweak, remix. It'll take a lot less time than if you had to learn to code or if you're reading the files or you're writing the files or anything like that. It's just a lot quicker. The feedback loop is quicker. The process is quicker. You can just do anything at any time and just consistently keep churning out stuff. ## Fail forward The way to learn about code is to build ahead of your capability and fail forward. I feel like everyone who is not technical today who wants to be in this world, who wants to do stuff like this, can absolutely do it. They just need some permission to do that. To play around. You must think of it like play. Sign up to a CLI agent like Droid. Say you want to build a personal website. Say you want to build a little RSS feed tracker, a little to-do list, a little workout app. Whatever you want to do, you just spin it up, start working on it. Every little hiccup, bug, or issue you run into—question it. Okay, why did this come up? Why did you hit those errors? You know you don't know how to code, so you shouldn't get bogged down with bugs - expert programmers hit bugs all the time. And you can take it to other places. You can go to ChatGPT or Claude and give it to different models for different perspectives. You're always gonna have all of the choice up there and all the different variations. ## Just pick one There are just so many different tools, so many different options. Ultimately, just pick one and just stick with it. Just learn that system. They all look fairly similar. They all work similarly. Obviously, I use Droid because I work at Factory. But also they get the best output of any models. (yay for model agnostic) Ultimately, what I want and what I need from a tool is: **is this one gonna help me get the furthest I can in the least amount of time with the least amount of trouble?** The more I have to do with using the tools themselves, the harder it is. Things like IDEs—I've tried a bunch. I used to use one in particular for a long time. It's just got so much extra stuff that I just don't need or care about. I just want to talk to a model, have code written. If I need to inspect some markdown files, I can now use what I've just recently discovered is a file manager in the terminal. So I can just look through that, or I can open it up in Zed, which is what I use now, just to view markdown files, edit them. If it's a changelog, for example, I want to tweak something briefly, go back to the CLI, and then just let it rip from there. And any tool or feature I think I'm missing, I'll have a crack at building it myself - like a terminal file viewer. *This whole thing is just a really big learning experience for me, and I'm really enjoying it. Build, fail forward, and keep shipping.*
TrustMRR now earns more revenue than my 3 main startups. - DataFast was built in 14 months - CodeFast was built in 9 months - ShipFast was built in 7 days - TrustMRR was built in 1 day Entrepreneurship ≠ linear
the claude agent sdk will do for knowledge work in 2026 what claude code did for coding in 2025. want to live in the future? build your own agents with it. you’ll have a personal magic tool belt that the public won’t have for another 6-12mo. it 100% feels like personal agi.
fun fact: you’re 40% more likely to hit your goals if you keep them private. sharing your 2026 plans prematurely triggers a "social reality" in your brain it gives you a fake dopamine hit of success before you've even started. that premature satisfaction kills the drive needed for the actual grind.
You can FINALLY switch between Opus 4.5/GPT-5.2 (or any other model) in the same chat in Droid I have been wanting this for a long time
2025 as an entrepreneur: Earned $885K with my startups Launched 3 new startups Built a $780K SaaS Made $147K in the stock market Got 107K followers on 𝕏 Read 10 books Traveled to 9 countries Exercised for 340+ days Gained 4kg of muscles Walked 4.2M steps Top 1% sleep score on WHOOP Reached 57.4 mg/kg/min VO₂ max Reached <18 yo biological age Drank 0L of alcohol Spent 365 days with my wife I hope 2026 unfolds like 2025: peace of mind, discipline, more startups. Happy New Year
everyone is locked in right now new year, new me, new energy but after the motivation fades, reality kicks in so you’re locked in...now what? this is where most people lose it not because they’re lazy but because no one teaches you what to actually do with your day this is not about grinding 24/7 or turning into a robot just small habits that help you stop wasting time and start seeing progress Start your day offline most of people are fond of picking their phone up first to doomscroll ct, check discord or telegram for what happened while they’re sleeping don’t let that be your first action when you wake up in the morning if you’re a man/woman of faith, make a small prayer and allow your brain 20- 30 mins quiet time before you let the world inside that quiet time is where you gain clarity for the day but if you wake up and its social media content, you’ll mostly react to what you see and not use it to build yourself Decide on one thing that actually matters for each day you don’t need to do 10 things per day to call it a productive day you only need to prioritize one thing and do it to the T 👌🏾 you maximize your time each day when you write down a goal you’re trying to achieve and work only on just that Do the hard thing first our brain is wired in a way to always avoid the hard stuff and go for the easier ones that task you’re avoiding is the right one you need to do first once you do it, you’ll feel a huge burden has been taken out of your shoulders if you push it to later, it follows you all day like a crying child Limit Your Inputs you do not need to know everything happening on ct today. check ct less if you don’t have any business on here unless you’re a creator that need to be in the algorithm doomscrolling all day without any meaningful interaction is just time wasting me lock in is about focus, not awareness Produce Something Every Day i have made it a habit that i must make one meaningful post per day. it is not much but it’s honest work make it a habit that something must leave you daily be it a post, a line of code, a design, a document, or anything if nothing comes out of you, nothing compounds consumption is neutral, production moves the needle Live a good lilfestyle Living a good lifestyle is very underrated in a space that prioritized grinding 24/7 It’s not healthy sitting at your desk all day and bending your back like a 96 years old grandpa 👴 take a walk, stretch a bit, or go to the gym and lift weights your mind works better when your body is in good shape and not tired Review each day at night before you sleep ask this three simple questions: what did i do well? what did i waste time on? what should i do better tomorrow? this is not self hate or anything. just getting feedback. same way you’re assessed back in college, you need to do this daily to ensure you’re on the track SLEEEPPPPP you’re not Optimus prime, your body gets tired and weak when you don’t rest rest is also part of the system you cannot lock in on 4-5 hours of sleep per day, you’re killin yourself lowkey go to bed on time and wake up early to start your day. TL;dr lock in is not about doing everything it’s about doing the right things every day use your 24 hours well do the boring bits stay consistent that’s how real momentum is built if you stick with it long enough, people will call you lucky.
the real quiet winners of the vibecoding revolution are domain registrars
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