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"the dot-com bubble"

I'm squarely in the camp of believing that there is an insatiable demand for software, and until that stops, software engineers are going to be in overwhelmingly short supply in the long term. AI is forcing companies to recalibrate their resources (we're all seeing that now with layoffs and freezes), but once AI is more-or-less saturated among most companies, hiring more engineers will, once again, be the only way to build more product than the competition. And yes, being better than the competition is all that matters. Not being better than the competition 2 years ago. The pre-AI world is gone and not coming back. Readjust your expectations. Companies that think they'll be able to last with tiny headcounts are going to get crushed by the companies who choose to grow and force AI adoption across large teams. Yes, there's a brief period where adoption hasn't fully hit yet, but once it has, the low water mark for productivity will adjust and you still need more people to build more product, unless you have some secret AI sauce that no one else has access to (indie solopreneur building saas products, that's not you!).

Conveniently omitted: Apple banned their developer account because they were scamming people.

Here's the "$30m ARR in 30 days" formula: 1. Pick a vertical (health, finance, sports). 2. Create several TikTok accounts and follow trending accounts in that vertical 3. Formulate an app idea to solve a recurring problem you find interesting in that vertical, then code it, ideally with vibes. IMPORTANT: even if you don't vibe code it, you must say you did for maximum engagement. 4. Pull out all of the scammy stops: ask for reviews before users have even completed onboarding, lots of irrelevant onboarding questions to create psychological commitment, hard paywall, etc. Importantly do a free trial. 5. Release the app and get an army of TikTok influencers to "organically" promote it. It's important you tell everyone that it's organic even if they're undisclosed ads. Makes it seem more impressive. Spend at least $30k. Do this for about a month. 6. After you get an initial cohort of users, ratchet up your weekly / monthly / annual prices by 5-10x and whatever you do don't grandfather in existing users! 7. Take a screenshot of your Superwall ARR graph after you've increased the subscription fees because they count ARR before renewals actually kick in. Helpful for maximizing social clout. You should be at ~$25-30m "ARR" by now. 8. Now, get an army of lieutenants on X to simultaneously post about your "crazy growth" and how you're the "fastest growing app in history". Use the thread (🧵) emoji in your post to make it seem you're going to drop some knowledge but don't actually follow up with anything, this is key. You need to create some mystique. IMPORTANT: Whatever you do, at this point do NOT mention to anyone on that you your account was banned by Apple for defrauding customers, for paying for promotional social media posts without proper disclosure, and for building an app that doesn't actually work. Also don't mention how you didn't actually collect anywhere close to the money you said because Apple clawed back your revenues. 9. Congrats! If you've made it this far, this is where the real money is: it's time to release a course. Make it cost ~$5k or more, and open it up for a very limited period. Limit the spots to <100 or so. Tout how people will learn all your "tricks" and "secrets" to growing an app this fast. People have paid thousands for the above playbook and I just gave it away for free. Please comment, like, retweet, and follow for more iOS dev secrets.

This is a banger quote from Liang Wenfeng (CEO of DeepSeek).

One shocking thing to me is that Microsoft hasn't done anything to turn VSCode into an agentic editor. Windsurf/Cursor are walking all over them, despite Microsoft being super well equipped to do something about it. Why? Must be big company bullshit, if I had to guess.

I made a thing that lets you import Facebook contacts into Gmail: http://www.friendstogmail.com/

Cisco has the opportunity to do the absolute funniest thing of all time.

Sorry but this is just fake news. Disappointing to see YC partners stooping this low. This is just pure rage bait, with zero evidence. I expect it from others, but not them.

There’s no way they didn’t do this on purpose for the exposure. Remember: everything is fake

I'm locking in. Turning the account private in a few hours and going to keep it that way until I hit $1m ARR. Not tweeting anything except the equivalent of investor updates—monthly revenue progress, learnings, and announcements. See y'all on the other side. 🫡

This feels like pure performance art. I understand if parts of the stack are automated, but I actually don’t believe anyone on earth has built a completely automated, self-improving, piece of software. Whoever does that has built the most valuable software that has ever existed. I’d love to be proved wrong: show me a live stream of one of the projects self improving and I’ll happily eat my words.

Once again, I wonder how long it'll take for folks to realize that AI is actually super expensive and the only reason anyone thinks it's cheap is due to massive overcapitalization of scale ups like OpenAI and Anthropic who are bleeding money to subsidize power users.

This is true. That being said, at “modern” startups you don’t make anywhere close to as much as you would at big tech The tradeoff (and expectation!) is that you make up for the compensation delta in large part through equity.

Short videos (<5 mins) on tactical tricks and skills to make yourself a better developer. Does this exist?

"the dot-com bubble"

I'm squarely in the camp of believing that there is an insatiable demand for software, and until that stops, software engineers are going to be in overwhelmingly short supply in the long term. AI is forcing companies to recalibrate their resources (we're all seeing that now with layoffs and freezes), but once AI is more-or-less saturated among most companies, hiring more engineers will, once again, be the only way to build more product than the competition. And yes, being better than the competition is all that matters. Not being better than the competition 2 years ago. The pre-AI world is gone and not coming back. Readjust your expectations. Companies that think they'll be able to last with tiny headcounts are going to get crushed by the companies who choose to grow and force AI adoption across large teams. Yes, there's a brief period where adoption hasn't fully hit yet, but once it has, the low water mark for productivity will adjust and you still need more people to build more product, unless you have some secret AI sauce that no one else has access to (indie solopreneur building saas products, that's not you!).

Conveniently omitted: Apple banned their developer account because they were scamming people.

Here's the "$30m ARR in 30 days" formula: 1. Pick a vertical (health, finance, sports). 2. Create several TikTok accounts and follow trending accounts in that vertical 3. Formulate an app idea to solve a recurring problem you find interesting in that vertical, then code it, ideally with vibes. IMPORTANT: even if you don't vibe code it, you must say you did for maximum engagement. 4. Pull out all of the scammy stops: ask for reviews before users have even completed onboarding, lots of irrelevant onboarding questions to create psychological commitment, hard paywall, etc. Importantly do a free trial. 5. Release the app and get an army of TikTok influencers to "organically" promote it. It's important you tell everyone that it's organic even if they're undisclosed ads. Makes it seem more impressive. Spend at least $30k. Do this for about a month. 6. After you get an initial cohort of users, ratchet up your weekly / monthly / annual prices by 5-10x and whatever you do don't grandfather in existing users! 7. Take a screenshot of your Superwall ARR graph after you've increased the subscription fees because they count ARR before renewals actually kick in. Helpful for maximizing social clout. You should be at ~$25-30m "ARR" by now. 8. Now, get an army of lieutenants on X to simultaneously post about your "crazy growth" and how you're the "fastest growing app in history". Use the thread (🧵) emoji in your post to make it seem you're going to drop some knowledge but don't actually follow up with anything, this is key. You need to create some mystique. IMPORTANT: Whatever you do, at this point do NOT mention to anyone on that you your account was banned by Apple for defrauding customers, for paying for promotional social media posts without proper disclosure, and for building an app that doesn't actually work. Also don't mention how you didn't actually collect anywhere close to the money you said because Apple clawed back your revenues. 9. Congrats! If you've made it this far, this is where the real money is: it's time to release a course. Make it cost ~$5k or more, and open it up for a very limited period. Limit the spots to <100 or so. Tout how people will learn all your "tricks" and "secrets" to growing an app this fast. People have paid thousands for the above playbook and I just gave it away for free. Please comment, like, retweet, and follow for more iOS dev secrets.

AirPods Max: buy now or wait for the next gen?

One shocking thing to me is that Microsoft hasn't done anything to turn VSCode into an agentic editor. Windsurf/Cursor are walking all over them, despite Microsoft being super well equipped to do something about it. Why? Must be big company bullshit, if I had to guess.

Anyone else having fun migrating to Swift 6?

I made a thing that lets you import Facebook contacts into Gmail: http://www.friendstogmail.com/

What's the best Google Workspace replacement, if all I need is a thing to capture emails?

Claude is the dark horse of the big labs. • Anthropic released Sonnet 3.7 today which handily beats SOTA in a ton of benchmarks, and it isn't even a reasoning model! • Meanwhile, MCP, released in November, is quietly being integrated everywhere. • The industry standard for anything coding related is still Sonnet 3.5 (yes, it's crazy expensive, which is a limiter), despite being released more than 6 months ago. Also, their aesthetic is just gorgeous. Love them. I'll admit that I'm still using gpt4o-mini for mostly everything since it's dirt cheap and is "good enough", but if Anthropic finds a way to lower inference costs that they will start to really pick up traction.

This feels like pure performance art. I understand if parts of the stack are automated, but I actually don’t believe anyone on earth has built a completely automated, self-improving, piece of software. Whoever does that has built the most valuable software that has ever existed. I’d love to be proved wrong: show me a live stream of one of the projects self improving and I’ll happily eat my words.

Waiting for Review.

The only reason Zuck would be doing this is because he thinks AI is an existential threat to Meta if they don’t win it. And he might be right, if there were to be a single winner. But I think the more likely outcome is that no one “wins” and he’s just lighting up hundreds of millions of dollars on fire for no reason.

I don't know why I feel like such an outsider with this opinion but I think OpenAI's memory-by-default model sucks. I don't want the app to remember everything about me. I'm asking questions on behalf of my wife and 9yo constantly, and it just screws up the context massively.

Once again, I wonder how long it'll take for folks to realize that AI is actually super expensive and the only reason anyone thinks it's cheap is due to massive overcapitalization of scale ups like OpenAI and Anthropic who are bleeding money to subsidize power users.