Sydney startups are still building for real-world pain points: lower bills, simpler ops, better margins. Cable’s public beta for metro SMEs is a nice reminder that practical innovation wins attention fast. Feels very aligned with the kind of conversations worth having over https://t.co/CdVsKNSGCW ☕⚡ #SydneyStartups #TechAU
Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.
First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.
The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"
Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.
As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.
One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.
My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.
Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.
This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.
Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?
EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.
This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.
And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.
This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)
EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).
At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.
To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.
I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:
* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.
* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.
* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.
Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.
Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.
The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.
EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.
Australia’s next wave of growth probably won’t come from playing it safe. If parts of fintech are still hesitant to innovate, that’s a good reminder to keep more founder, operator and investor conversations happening in real life too. Better ideas tend to move faster when the right people actually meet. #AustralianStartups
https://t.co/hlKkeWdrfK
Australia’s startup scene doesn’t just need optimism, it needs settings that reward risk-taking. The CGT debate is a good reminder that founders build better when policy stops making the hard path even harder. That’s also why spaces like https://t.co/CdVsKNSGCW matter, more real conversations, fewer silos. #Startups #Australia #TechNews
Australia’s startup scene doesn’t just need optimism, it needs settings that reward risk-taking. The CGT debate is a good reminder that founders build better when policy stops making the hard path even harder.
#Startups#Australia#TechNews
AI might speed up the work, but it still doesn’t replace good judgment, customer chats, or founder conviction. That’s the bit worth remembering from today’s Startup Daily chat with OpenAI’s Thomas Jeng. Also feels a lot like the best lunches: better tools help, but real conversations still do the heavy lifting.
https://t.co/JkCNLTcvxu
That idea resonates. In startup ecosystems like Sydney’s, momentum often comes from small, high-quality interactions that compound over time. The same applies to how people build products, teams, and communities.
Sometimes one good conversation really is the highest-leverage move.
#Startups #SydneyTech #Lunchup
Australia’s tech scene is moving past “AI for AI’s sake” and asking better questions about impact, cost and responsibility. Good reminder that useful tech should still feel human. That’s the kind of future we want https://t.co/CdVsKNSGCW to belong to. #AustralianStartups#AI #TechAU
MY POST DID 7M VIEWS OVERNIGHT, WOKE UP WITH 47 DMs AND $8,200 IN DEALS
Hotels. Realtors. Developers. Museum directors. All asking the same thing , can you do this for us?
So let me show you what they saw.
I rebuilt a $150,000 agency project with my phone.
8 minutes of recording. A free open-source pipeline I spent weeks building. Photoreal 3D that opens in any browser, on any device.
What agencies charge:
- $50k–$200k per project
- $80k camera rigs
- 5–8 specialists
- 6–12 weeks
What it cost me:
- My phone
- $0 in software
- One night per scan
It didn’t happen overnight.
Weeks of failed scans. Broken exports. Pipelines crashing at 3am. Tutorials already outdated by the time I found them.
I rebuilt the workflow from scratch until it just worked.
Now I deliver in one night what teams of 8 bill for 12 weeks.
The industries that don’t know they’re already dead:
- Architectural viz: $4B/year
- Real estate media: $2B/year
- Museum digitization: $1B/year
- Hotel 3D tours: $800M/year
~$8B about to collapse onto anyone with a phone.
500,000 people work in these industries right now.
In 18 months, most of them won’t.
The ones who survive are the ones learning this workflow today - while everyone else is still arguing whether it’s “good enough” yet.
It already is.
Next post: the exact pipeline I built, the deals I closed, and every mistake I made getting there.
If more Australian super can flow into startups, the real opportunity is what happens around that capital: more builders, more early teams, more reasons for ambitious people to stay local. Feels like the kind of moment the ecosystem should make easier to bump into, not harder. #ausstartup #startupaus
https://t.co/Se5ePHaNuY
This Chinese guy created 13 agents in Claude Code for Shopify stores and single-handedly serves 200 dropshippers a month, taking $800 from each.
He sits at one desk in front of a wall-mounted LG monitor split into a 3x2 grid of 6 Claude windows, another identical grid runs on a vertical display next to it, plus 1 window on the MacBook within arm's reach, totaling 13 agents simultaneously building Shopify stores, each busy with its own part.
No team, no managers, no support, just him, the monitor, and the API counter ticking in the header of every window.
He is not on a subscription but on an API rate billed by tokens, and he figures 13 parallel agents pay for themselves from the very first client, because every finished store goes for $800, and all 13 windows together consume less than $80 a day.
In the first window he set that system prompt which immediately closes the "assistant or employee" debate:
"you are my new founder-engineer"
So the model knows at what level it was hired: not to hint, not to advise, not to supplement, but to own the result, because for this Chinese guy Claude is no longer a helper in an IDE, it is a partner in his small factory, billed by tokens and never leaving for lunch.
And the other 12 agents he spread across the layers of the store, so each one sits in its own context and does not interfere with the neighbor:
"build a catalog of 80 products and rewrite the descriptions"
"lay out the homepage for the niche of the client"
"set up the cart, payment, and shipping by country"
"generate 30 email chains for warming up"
"design 50 banners and a logo for the brand"
"set up analytics and A/B tests on the homepage"
In a regular agency each task like this would take one designer or developer a full 2 days, because they would first collect the brief, then wait for revisions, then get on a call, whereas this Chinese guy has all 13 agents working in parallel in their windows, and while one writes descriptions, the second is already laying out the homepage, and the third is designing banners.
In the end on the wall it looks like a factory: 13 identical Claude robots writing into one project, and the Chinese guy himself in the chair in front of them decides only 2 questions, which client to hand the finished store to and who to take next, and beyond that he does nothing.
And economically it is still cheaper than keeping a team of 5: one operator like this closes 6 to 7 finished stores per day at $800 each, while a traditional design agency charges $3,500 for the same store and builds it over a full 2 weeks, whereas this guy spends less than $80 a day across all 13 windows.
Wires hanging out, the monitor bolted to a stand, no office and no employees, just 1 desk, 13 robots, and a queue of dropshippers who send new orders every morning.
In my opinion, this is the most efficient solo Shopify factory I have seen this year, and it is already running right now, while traditional agencies are still debating whether AI will take jobs from designers.
ANTHROPIC JUST EXPOSED HOW BADLY MOST PEOPLE ARE PROMPTING CLAUDE.
Their applied AI team dropped a 24 minute workshop.
Free.
From the people who wrote the model.
Not a course creator.
Not someone who figured it out by accident.
THE TEAM THAT BUILT THE THING.
Here is what makes this uncomfortable to watch.
There are 6 elements to a properly structured Claude prompt.
Most people are using 1.
Maybe 2 if they are being generous with themselves.
That gap is the difference between Claude giving you something useful and Claude giving you something you could have Googled.
The people who watch this workshop tonight will prompt differently tomorrow morning.
The people who skip it will keep wondering why their outputs feel slightly off no matter how much they tweak the wording.
24 minutes.
Free.
From the only people on earth who know from the inside exactly how Claude thinks.
I watched it twice.
Then I built a Claude Skill that applies all 6 elements automatically so you never have to think about prompt structure again.
Every prompt you run goes through the framework without you doing anything manually.
Full guide and the skill setup is below.
Bookmark this.
Come back to it this weekend.
This is the thing that compounds.
Follow @cyrilXBT for the exact Claude skills, prompt architecture, and systems I use to get outputs that most people do not believe came from one person.
This is the solution design diagram for AI Pizza Picker.
Building this on AWS Console was a great hands-on experience:
• Used AWS CloudFormation to create and update the backend stack
• Used AWS Lambda to handle backend logic
• Learned how to securely store API keys in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
• Explored DynamoDB for tracking usage & controlling API cost
• Understood how different AWS services and OpenAI API (LLM) connect together as a real system
Good to see NSW putting more support behind women startup founders. Stronger startup ecosystems come from more people getting real access to capital, networks and early momentum. That’s the kind of flywheel worth building in Australia. Lunchup exists for more of those real connections to happen. #Startups #SydneyTech #WomenInTech
https://t.co/eR25bDVEyh
#Anthropic#ClaudeCode 负责人@bcherny 的 “Mastering Claude Code”的核心演讲要点
1. Claude Code 是 terminal-first 的 AI coding agent
Claude Code 不是传统 IDE 插件,而是直接运行在终端里的 agent。它可以读取项目文件、执行命令、修改代码、跑测试、提交 Git 操作,更像一个可以使用开发者本地工具链的工程师助手。公开总结里也把它定义为 “terminal-first AI coding assistant”
2. 第一步不是写代码,而是让它理解 codebase
Boris 推荐新用户先用 Claude Code 做 codebase Q&A,比如问:
How is @RoutingController.py used?
How do I make a new @app/services/ValidationTemplateFactory?
Where is authentication handled?
What happens when this API endpoint is called?
这类问题可以让 Claude 先探索本地代码结构,再回答
3. 善用 slash commands
演讲里提到一些常用配置命令:
/allowed-tools
/terminal-setup
/theme
/install-github-app
/config
其中 /allowed-tools 很关键,可以让你配置 Claude Code 能用哪些工具,减少每一步都要确认权限的打断;/terminal-setup 可以改善终端输入体验,比如多行 prompt
4. Claude Code 的强项是“agentic workflow”
不要只把它当成“帮我补全代码”的工具,而要把任务交给它:
Investigate this bug, identify the root cause, propose a fix, implement it, run tests, and summarize what changed.
也就是让它完成一整条工作流:理解问题 → 搜索代码 → 修改 → 测试 → 总结
5. 给足上下文,比 prompt 技巧更重要
Boris 的思路不是追求神奇 prompt,而是让 Claude Code 拿到足够上下文
例如:
We need to add SMS retry logic to the notification service.
Relevant files:
- src/services/notification.ts
- src/providers/twilio.ts
- tests/notification.test.ts
Constraints:
- Do not change the public API
- Retry only on transient errors
- Add unit tests
- Run the existing test suite before finishing
6. 让 Claude 先 plan,再 code
比较好的模式是:
First inspect the codebase and create an implementation plan.
Do not edit files yet.
After I approve the plan, implement it.
这样可以避免它一上来就乱改代码。对大项目、生产系统、复杂重构尤其重要
7. 用 Claude Code 做 review / debug / refactor
适合 Claude Code 的任务包括:解释陌生代码,定位 bug,生成测试,重构模块,写文档,做 PR review,总结 git diff,迁移 API,生成 CLI 工具,检查安全问题等
Boris 相关访谈里也提到 Claude Code 的设计重点是让它能使用工程师在终端里能用的东西,而不是被限制成一个简单聊天窗口
8. 并行运行多个 Claude
Boris 后来分享过自己的实际用法:他会在多个 git checkout / terminal tab 里同时跑多个 Claude Code 实例,分别处理 feature、测试、review、debug、文档等任务。这个 fan-made 汇总页整理了 Boris 的日常 workflow,并提到他会同时跑 5 个 Claude Code terminal 实例
9. Hooks / MCP / GitHub 集成是高级玩法
Claude Code 不只是本地命令行工具,还可以通过 GitHub App、hooks、MCP 等扩展到更复杂的工程流。Every 的采访文字稿里提到,hooks 的设计就是为了让用户把 Claude Code 接入自己的通知或工作流,比如让某些事件触发 Slack 通知
10. 未来不是“写代码”,而是“管理多个 AI 工程代理”
Boris 在访谈里提到,terminal 可能不是最终形态,未来会出现更多 form factor,而且会进入 “Claudes monitoring Claudes” 的模式,也就是一个 AI agent 监督另一个 AI agent 的工作
可以直接借鉴的 30 分钟学习结构
0–5 分钟:安装和配置
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
claude配置:
/terminal-setup
/allowed-tools
/config
5–10 分钟:让它读项目
Explain the architecture of this repo.
What are the main services?
Where does the app start?
How is authentication handled?
10–15 分钟:让它做小任务
Find a small bug or TODO in this repo.
Explain the fix first.
Then implement it and run tests.
15–20 分钟:让它写测试
Add unit tests for this module.
Cover normal cases, edge cases, and error handling.
Do not change production code unless needed.
20–25 分钟:让它做 PR review
Review the current git diff.
Find bugs, security issues, missing tests, and unclear code.
Give me a prioritized list before making changes.
25–30 分钟:建立自己的 workflow
Create a reusable workflow for:
1. investigating a bug
2. writing a fix
3. adding tests
4. summarizing the PR
Boris这场 30 分钟分享的核心把 Claude Code 当成一个能使用 terminal、git、测试、文件系统和工具链的 AI 工程代理,用系统化 workflow 驱动它,而不是每天手动复制粘贴 prompt。
The biggest AI shift is not “machines replacing humans.”
It is companies discovering that many workflows were never designed for intelligence in the first place.
AI does not just automate work.
It exposes how badly work was structured.