Henrique Fonseca

• ✠ Christian • Builder • Founder •
Leading technology @

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Craftmatters 2026 was almost two weeks ago and this post has been sitting in my drafts since. Better late than never.

A full day in Porto with people who actually care about the details: pixels, code, product decisions. Most of it came back to AI, and one debate stuck with me. Is AI killing craft, or reviving it?

Every startup lives in the same tension. Speed is survival, adapt or die, pure Darwin. But craft matters and quality matters. The job isn't choosing one, it's finding the balance.

Same with AI. It's the best productivity multiplier I've worked with. For the right people, 10x, sometimes 100x. But it won't replace everyone, at least not now. Give the best tools to someone with no technical foundation and they'll ship fast, and they'll ship garbage.

I've been saying this since last year's wave of "AI will replace X" and end-of-the-world takes. Good to see people calmer about it now.
Durable products come from judgment and taste, not just prompts. Knowing why a choice holds, where it breaks, what to cut. AI makes a good engineer faster. It doesn't make a non-engineer good.

I feel this every day at @ https://t.co/dyInj4hRVI. We're building telehealth software people rely on for their health. You can't prompt your way to that. AI helps my team move quicker through the routine parts, but the quality, the safety, the trust? That's still craft. And still people.

AI changes how we build. It doesn't change what good means.

At @ https://t.co/dyInj4hRVI craft matters to us too. It's why we're taking our time to build the best things we can. Wait for what's coming.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

@levelsio 😔

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Provavelmente é rage bait mas não consigo ignorar.

“Se despenalizar não significa legalizar, não há aborto legal em Portugal.”
Exato, o aborto não é legal em Portugal, simplesmente deixou de ser crime. O português aqui interessa. Qual é a dúvida? Fazer leis e não saber isto (ou fingir que não se sabe para enganar as pessoas) é grave...

O Polígrafo muitas vezes falha e pode ser enganador, mas neste caso está certo.

[Rita Maria Matias @ritamariamatias]

Se despenalizar não significa legalizar, não há aborto legal em Portugal. @jornalpoligrafo aguardo pela resposta em horário nobre.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

As Darwin said, the most adaptable wins

[Linear @linear]

Issue tracking is dead.
We are building what comes next.

https://t.co/JM2d4mAEEB

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

💰🐄

[Revolut @Revolut]

Our 2025 pre-tax profit of $2.3B marks our fifth straight year of profitability.

We’re proving that high-speed innovation and financial sustainability go hand-in-hand.

This resilience is powered by a diversified ecosystem: 11 of our business and retail products each generated over $135M (£100M) in revenue in 2025.

As we continue to scale, the average Revolut customer is more active than ever. We’re seeing significant year-over-year growth¹ across our core services:
+24% in investments
+24% in transactions
+11% in account balances & savings
+9% in paid plan subscriptions

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

POV: Antrhopic’s social media intern posting the new Claude update of the day.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Hey OpenClaw 🦞, put all my savings into $ROBO

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Breaking: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy manufacturing companies and use AI to automate them https://t.co/bBjxEelixr

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Damn, getting old
#MyXAnniversary

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

🪦

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Meta announces they'll be shutting down the Metaverse, after pouring $80,000,000,000.00 into the project.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Why so much yapping about a bad judgment call and investment? It happens to the best of us chill 😭

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.

None of it was real.

I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.

I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."

The frontier closed last week.

It's a mobile app now.

Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.

I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.

The avatars didn't have legs.

I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.

I called myself a "digital land baron."

I put it in my Twitter bio.

I put it in my LinkedIn headline.

I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.

My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.

My actual apartment has furniture.

Location, location, location.

My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.

I held.

Diamond hands.

That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.

A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.

He said I didn't understand the technology.

I didn't.

I still bought more.

We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.

We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."

The vote passed unanimously.

I voted four times.

My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."

The slide had a rocket emoji.

That was my entire financial model.

In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.

It's worth $14,000 now.

I don't talk about the Ape.

I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.

My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.

I said "digital art on the blockchain."

She asked why it cost more than her car.

I said "you don't understand Web3."

She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."

She's not in my Discord.

Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.

It's worth about $90,000 now.

I felt better about mine after I heard that.

That's community.

WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.

We're all gonna make it.

None of us made it.

But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.

It doesn't.

But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.

Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.

I need to say that again.

$84 billion.

More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.

They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.

It lives on as a mobile app.

My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.

Location, location, location.

Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."

Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.

That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.

They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."

The pivot took four years and $84 billion.

I pivoted too.

I'm an AI real estate investor now.

I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."

I don't know what that means.

I gave him $40,000.

He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.

The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.

Q4 is always blank.

That's where the exit scam goes.

My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.

I said $1.2 million.

He said "current market value."

I said $6,400.

He stared at me for eleven seconds.

I know because I counted.

He asked if I had any other investments.

I showed him my NFTs.

He stared for longer.

I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."

He asked if I'd considered a 401k.

I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."

He told me to leave his office.

The metaverse is dead.

I don't accept that.

I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.

Location, location, location.

The location is nowhere.

But I'm early.

I'm always early.

That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Still can't (and never will) upload a soul 🥱

[Kekius Maximus @Kekius_Sage]

Scientists froze a mouse’s memory-related brain tissue at -196°C for an entire week, thawed it, and the memories and learned functions returned perfectly.

This shows that cryosleep and mind uploading are now real.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

100% agree, useEffect is a Pandora’s box you create now, only to open later and regret it

[Alvin Sng @alvinsng]

https://t.co/vgBH7h8JZO

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

This is really impressive from an engineering perspective, but I don’t understand why people are panicking.
No one wants to watch robots play, we like seeing humans and their personalities (until robots learn to trash talk and rage bait 🤣)

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

'LATENT' learns tennis skills for humanoid robots from human motion data.

The robot can sustain multi-shot rallies, handle ball speeds of 15+ m/s, and showed a 90.9% success rate for the forehand.

No onboard cameras or vision models, relies on external MoCap for high-precision, low-latency ball tracking.

Paper: https://t.co/Ji96gaQUNx

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

Pretty impressive. Nowadays, every day is just news about AI, I was missing hearing about this kind of technological application

[Jonathan Moon @jmoonio]

For the past 12 months, I’ve been heads down building a robot.

Introducing Emma – an autonomous robot that scans farms, detects diseases, and measures yield.

Currently deployed in 14 vineyards and orchards in CA and NY.

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

It’s good to stop hearing “Claude just killed X startup.” Today it’s Google doing the killing 😭

[Google Labs @GoogleLabs]

Introducing the new @stitchbygoogle, Google’s vibe design platform that transforms natural language into high-fidelity designs in one seamless flow.

🎨Create with a smarter design agent: Describe a new business concept or app vision and see it take shape on an AI-native canvas.
⚡️ Iterate quickly: Stitch screens together into interactive prototypes and manage your brand with a portable design system.
🎤 Collaborate with voice: Use hands-free voice interactions to update layouts and explore new variations in real-time.

Try it now (Age 18+ only. Currently available in English and in countries where Gemini is supported.) → https://t.co/pmT9iHEpZa

[Henrique Fonseca @hercfonseca]

We’re doomed 🤓

[Complex @Complex]

Petri dish of human brain cells learned how to play ‘DOOM’ 🫣

Scientists at Cortical Labs trained a cluster of lab-grown human brain cells to play Doom. The tiny ‘mini-brain,’ about a million neurons, previously learned how to play ‘Pong’ back in 2022. It’s not very good yet, but researchers at the lab say the cells are slowly learning.

[via/ CorticalLabs]