Ben

PE CRE | Data | Father & Husband
Views are my own

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

This.

[Sahil Lavingia @shl]

The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@theo_louro SEO

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@buildwtim Hi! Sound like we have a lot in common, but im few years younger and a few less in MRR achieved to date.

How are you getting your initial customers??

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Turns out the future does have flying cars

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@denk_tweets @beehiiv Copy/pasting this to Claude. Thank you.

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

Interesting thread/analysis

[GURGAVIN @gurgavin]

1/ I WONDERED WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU JUST BUY THE BEST PERFORMING STOCK FROM THE YEAR BEFORE AND DO IT EVERY SINGLE YEAR

SO I BACKTESTED IT GOING BACK 15 YEARS

STARTING WITH $100 IN 2012:

END RESULTS

S&P 500 → $800

LAST YEAR'S WINNER → $176,114

[GURGAVIN @gurgavin]

1/ I WONDERED WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU JUST BUY THE BEST PERFORMING STOCK FROM THE YEAR BEFORE AND DO IT EVERY SINGLE YEAR

SO I BACKTESTED IT GOING BACK 15 YEARS

STARTING WITH $100 IN 2012:

END RESULTS

S&P 500 → $800

LAST YEAR'S WINNER → $176,114

[0xMarioNawfal - The Roundtable Show @RoundtableSpace]

Closed source is dead.

REA lets Claude Code or Codex take apart any app, all the way down to the binary, and explain exactly how a feature works.

- Native apps, Electron apps, websites, APKs, firmware, even smart contract bytecode
- Shows the evidence for every claim
- Then builds its own version of the feature

25,000+ GitHub stars in a single day. 100% open-source.

https://t.co/0u2Zc9TxmR

[Matthew Berman @MatthewBerman]

Reverse Engineer Anything 😂

Software is done.

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@maks6361 This is great. Do you post about these B2C projects? Or anywhere we can learn more about them?

[Max 🇮🇪🇱🇻🇨🇾 @maks6361]

https://t.co/v0FGOPemS9

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Wow

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

This is the doom I predicted a few days ago, coming for Photoshop. A clean-room open-source reimplementation.

No prizes for guessing that they decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust.

Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead.

https://t.co/0sxtGNaPtq

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

I am surprised that people are surprised this is how I prompt Claude.

Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker. There's no secret to prompting. There's no need to be overly scaffolded or prescriptive for most tasks -- give Claude a goal, and it will figure it out.

Back in the Sonnet 3.5 days, your prompt mattered a lot. Nowadays, it's much more important to communicate to the model:

1. What you want it to do
2. How much effort you want it to spend
3. How it should verify that it did the right thing

[James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp]

I constantly feel behind and stressed

This is coming from someone who does 50% of his work inside codex, often has multiple agents running, and follows the benchmarks of model releases

Then I see something like this and I’m reminded…we are still so early

If you’re reading this…you’re on the very very cutting edge

The world still has no idea what’s coming

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:

Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:

Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:

Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!

In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@hunterjisaacson What early day lessons can you share related to the news/newsletter business specifically? I’m trying to get a weekly newsletter stood up right now

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I literally can't think of a better risk/reward bet right now than building a ChatGPT plugin and getting in front of their 1.2 billion weekly users.

As of yesterday, ChatGPT recommends plugins in the middle of conversations. Millions of questions get asked every day with no plugin to recommend. Each one is an empty slot.

Facebook apps in 2007. iPhone apps in 2008. TikTok in 2019. Every big platform has a few months where distribution is free, and most people miss it.

I saw this firsthand when I lived in SF building venture backed companies. They are sacred times!

If I were starting this week:

1. Find a tool or workflow people already Google for or do by hand every week (PDF to Excel, invoice generator, weekly client reports)
2. Build it as a ChatGPT plugin
3. Write the description using the exact phrases people type into ChatGPT
4. Ship 5 of them and see which ones get picked up
5. Double down on the one with the most traction

In 12 months these slots will be crowded but right now they're pretty empty.

Most people will realize ChatGPT plugins were the biggest free distribution channel of 2026 sometime in 2027.

[Ben @Thoughtful_Ben]

@jackfriks @postbridge_ What did you use to create this?

[StripMallGuy @realEstateTrent]

This is going up on my office wall

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Only 3% of consumers in the United States 🇺🇸 actually pay for AI right now - a16z