I'm lucky enough to have a great doctor and access to excellent Bay Area medical care. I've taken lots of standard screening tests over the years and have tried lots of "health tech" devices and tools.
With all this said, by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigate my specific mutations, and having them recommend specific follow-on tests and treatments.
Population averages are population averages, but we ourselves are not averages. For example, it turns out that I probably have a 30x(!) higher-than-average predisposition to melanoma. Fortunately, there are both specific supplements that help counteract the particular mutations I have, and of course I can significantly dial up my screening frequency. So, this is very useful to know.
I don't know exactly how much the analysis cost, but probably less than $100. Sequencing my genome cost a few hundred dollars.
(One often sees papers and articles claiming that models aren't very good at medical reasoning. These analyses are usually based on employing several-year-old models, which is a kind of ludicrous malpractice. It is true that you still have to carefully monitor the agents' reasoning, and they do on occasion jump to conclusions or skip steps, requiring some nudging and re-steering. But, overall, they are almost literally infinitely better for this kind of work than what one can otherwise obtain today.)
There are still lots of questions about how this will diffuse and get adopted, but it seems very clear that medical practice is about to improve enormously. Exciting times!
I accidentally discovered how to compress a month of research into 3 hours.
A founder at a YC company showed me his Claude setup. I thought he was just fast. Then I watched him build an entire go-to-market strategy for a market he'd never worked in before.
Here's exactly what he did:
First: he didn't ask Claude to "research the market."
He fed it 8 competitor landing pages, 3 earnings call transcripts, 12 customer reviews, and a Reddit thread of complaints.
Then he asked one question:
"What does every successful player in this market understand that their customers never say out loud?"
Not "summarize these." Not "analyze the competition."
The unspoken insight. The thing that takes founders 2 years of customer calls to figure out.
But the next part is what broke my brain.
He followed up with:
"Now show me the 3 assumptions this entire market is built on, and what would have to be true for each one to be wrong."
In 15 minutes he had the attack surface of an entire industry.
The blind spots. The fragile consensus. The opening nobody was talking about.
Most founders spend 6 months doing customer discovery just to find one of those.
Then he did something I've never seen before.
He asked:
"Write 5 questions a world-class investor would ask to destroy this business idea, then answer each one using only the evidence in these documents."
He spent the next 2 hours stress-testing every assumption. Every weak answer triggered a follow-up:
"What's the strongest version of this argument and where does it still break?"
By hour 3, he had a strategy deck that felt like it came from someone who'd spent a decade in the space.
The tool didn't change. The questions did.
Most people treat Claude like a faster Google.
These founders are using it like a thinking partner who has read everything and has no ego about being wrong.
The difference between 3 hours and 3 months isn't the amount of information.
It's knowing which questions actually matter.
Had some fun today.
Got 12 Mac Minis running in perfect sync to power through my latest builds . Clean, minimal, and absolute overkill.
You’re getting left behind in the dust. 💨