Barrett Shepherd 📦

Running @ShipMadeSimple for the last 7+ years - a simple 3PL for eComm brands. Still figuring out Twitter :)

[Ryan Hall, Y’all @ryanhallyall]

Texas is about to get plum smacked by some very large hail and high winds tomorrow. We have a Level 3 risk in place for Sunday and these storms could produce egg size hail or BIGGER. Make sure you have a way to get warnings and protect your vehicles.

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@awilkinson I started DCA’ing with a daily buy after your tweet. Not bad!

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@levelsio If you pop out all the batteries, there’s a USB port it’s just sort of in a weird spot.

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@omooretweets @npew It’s so wild seeing the sentiment towards both flip

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@sama did killing Sora just unleash compute?

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

expanding codex into "for everything" is such a smart move. feels silly saying "ChatGPT" when talking about anything serious

[Andrew Ambrosino @ajambrosino]

Codex for everything:

- Dynamic UI for the task at hand
- 20% faster computer & browser use
- Even better slides and sheets
- Annotate in browser, artifacts, and code
- Easier to get started
- Cleaner design across the app
- Performance improvements
- (no clunky handoff/switching)

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

Anyone else dealing with Opus 4.7 being "lazier" than 4.6?

It feels like it constantly makes assumptions, tells me to check/look, describes a solution but doesn't implement, etc. I don't remember this happening like this with 4.6

[Andrew Youderian @youderian]

Can owning your warehouse slow growth 90%?!

Shockingly, yes. Here's the details + 2 more crazy findings from my deep dive on 300 stores.

Starting with the warehouse one because it floored me.

If you owned your warehouse, your avg rev growth was 4%. If you leased or outsourced, growth was 30-35%. A 9x gap.

Correlation, not causation. But I've heard from multiple owners who said "yep, that tracks."

Once the warehouse pulls in your capital and attention, the growth side of the business quietly starves.

Worth asking yourself honestly: is the warehouse serving the business, or the other way around?
—
Second one: the finance skill cliff.

I asked owners to self-rate their financial literacy 1-5.

As expected, the jump from 3/5 -> 4/5 improves. Net margins go from 8.9% to 9.7%.

But the shocker? It's the jump from 4/5 (good) -> 5/5 (great) that has a massive impact.

THAT jump doubles cash runway and meaningfully increases net income growth by close to 50%. (See chart below)

80/20 doesn't apply here. The last 20% is where the real money lives.

If finance isn't your strength, this is probably the highest-ROI thing you can work on in 2026.

—

Third: tariffs.

Of the brands impacted, they absorbed 58% of the cost themselves. For every $10 in new product cost, they only raised prices $4.

It's why inflation came in lower than most predicted. It's also why a bunch of you are quietly eating margin right now and calling it a rough year.

If you haven't seriously tested raising prices post-tariff, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

Scary? Yes. Also the single highest-leverage move most owners can make.

——

The full 55-page Trends Report on the @ecomfuelco website now for more on these + much more.

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@auchenberg @openclaw @sendbluedotcom I’m assuming you aren’t running it on a Mac but if you are… https://t.co/kYfUS0DhAN

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

I had no idea that when you cancelled Claude subscription they FORCE you to tweet about it! wild!

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

The last month, Anthropic:

- Quietly nerfed their flagship model harness (Claude Code) without telling anyone

- Banned corporate customers of Claude

- Silently changed plans for customers with certain files in their repo

All evidence that closed models are *massive* risks.

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@Ryan___Doyle Ugh I keep running into this, even in Claude Code using the CLI 🙃

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Anthropic stealth-tweaked their claude code docs to increase the estimated average that a developer would spend a day from $6 to $13, and the "average for 90% of people" from $12 to $30 a day. Very nice stuff!
https://t.co/9zHZMVpDrd https://t.co/xJz9kNLyfn

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

I also can't recommend https://t.co/Mv8Nvxjo8W enough. it's been a game changer for work stuff with my OC (and uses my Claude sub)

discovered from @cathrynlavery's post

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

If you're running OpenClaw, Qwen 3.6+ has been the biggest unlock!

Cheap (use OpenRouter), and with a good soul.md it's a solid iMessage assistant

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

Honestly, the bigger thing is a custom "reply gate" tool i built that forces it to commit to a decision (suppress/react/spawn agent/reply). that's really made a difference with vibes/voice. Concrete examples/ scenarios in the soul.md have helped too.

I'm running via imessage so convos are shorter but no major drift so far.

(a lot of these ideas came from Poke)

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

Pair it with gpt-5.5 (free w/ openai sub) as the skilled agent and the whole setup runs for basically nothing. I use Qwen as just the "communication" layer

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@YIMBYLAND And the food is good, fresh and fairly cheap!

[Barrett Shepherd 📦 @BarrettShepherd]

@jacob_posel @coreyepstein How does this work? 👀 I've been wanting to work on a Skill like this but keep putting it off.