Nick Manning ⌨️

Solopreneur, author, mentor, proud father of two. Building 🤘 Prev: Google, 3x startup CTO. 👨‍💻 Sharing my findings along the way.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

So I'm crafting content for a small book and course over this winter break - heck why not?

Topic not yet public!

Yesterday was day 0.

I’ll be documenting my naive shot at this - because again, why not? Maybe it can cajole others to give a go? At minimum I can get some helpful feedback along the way from others.

Here’s what I did yesterday starting from absolute 0:

1. I recorded a brain dump video, talking about who, what, why, how etc about my idea.

Somehow video recording myself "put me on the spot" and I was able to focus more on conciseness.

2. I generated a book/course outline from this.

I uploaded the video to https://t.co/izX28fB5PM to transcribe it. I refined it into a tentative chapter outline and dumped it into Notion.

Side note: I typically like the https://t.co/izX28fB5PM iOS app to quickly record my thoughts so that's why I went with that. And for some reason I'm not a huge fan of writing like this in Markdown (i.e. via Obsidian) so I'm trying Notion. I like the writing experience in Notion especially with the prospect of later collaborating with an editor later.

3. Then I recorded a brain dump video on "topic A”.

So this time not a video, just for convenience. I used https://t.co/U7SJgZk922's macOS app to just talk away for 30 minutes directly into Notion. Talking for about 30 minutes gave me roughly 2000 words. Calculating how much I need to do this gave me a lot of motivation.

For example, I want to craft a book and course where someone can choose to read or consume video. For video, I want to keep it to max 2-3 hours so I'm going for 10k words per hour. Therefore I whittle it down 2000 words with heavy editing. I think that after a few weeks of repeating this process I can achieve this goal, then heavily edit the content down further.

Notes for the engineers reading this (warning, needless geeking out here). I may consider just self publishing later later + host the video version on a microsite served by a simple web-app that pulls the content straight from Notion (cached of course when served up). I can later host multiple publications courses using that same web app as it could support multi-tenant (extract domain from HTTP header -> determine tenant to serve up, host on same VPS for dollars a month).

https://t.co/G2O2j4YIAp if anyone wants to keep tabs on my progress and gain some insights. Definitely not an expert on this entire process but I think the conversations will be interesting along the way.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

This is how you do a great startup video

Humble and chill and a real cool backstory

[Vitalii Dodonov @vitaliidodonov]

I made $3.36M in May 2026.

🏦 Stan Store - $3.12M
💼 Stanley LinkedIn - $134K
🤳 Stanley Instagram - $122K

In the last 5 years, I've made $600M+ for my customers.

And got 11.5K followers on X.

All I'm trying to say is:
If you don't have a following here, it doesn't matter.

[Sac @Saccc_c]

这哥们靠vibe coding直播公开build产品，月收入超2万美金

最大成本花在了token上，3个Claude Max+1个200刀Codex。每天同时开六七个终端在youtube直播使劲造

当初刷到以为是整活的，没想到哥们玩真的😢

[Nishkarsh @contextkingceo]

Introducing HydraDB.

The graph native context infrastructure for agents. Purpose built to deliver precise context & observability into why agents act the way they do.

We've always believed graphs are the best way to manage AI context, but they've been too expensive to scale or impractical for storing full context. Until now.

@hydra_db combines in memory, NVMe, and object storage into a single graph layer, making context delivery faster, cheaper, and more precise.

We want context delivery to be extremely fast, 1000x cheap, and highly precise. Give your agents a brain.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

🤯

[shirish @shiri_shh]

The laptop hasn't changed in 30 years. NVIDIA just changed it

RTX Spark is their first PC chip ever.

- RTX 5070 level GPU
- 128GB unified memory
- 1 petaflop of local AI
- thin, light, barely throttles unplugged

Your AI agent lives on the machine. 24/7. No cloud.

This is step one of the agentic AI PC, and everyone else is about to copy it.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

When I started I was broke and didn't have or want funding (still don't)

My only way to get the word out about my websites was tell my story on here and on my blog

But if I told a basic normal story nobody would care

So you need something special

Back then I lucked out kinda because doing startups without funding was special (now it's normal) and doing it from your laptop while backpacking was special (now it's normal too) so nobody will care now if you do that

But you can find a modern unique edge to make your story interesting, you can see interesting stories on here go viral every day!

[Swati Gupta @hrswatigupta]

Anthropic pays $750,000+ a year for engineers who can build LLM architectures from scratch. Stanford taught the entire thing in 1 hour lecture & released it for free.

Bookmark & watch this today before someone takes it down and read this article below

[Khairallah AL-Awady @eng_khairallah1]

Anthropic engineer:

"You're not supposed to prompt Claude. You're supposed to build a system that prompts itself."

this is one of the best workflows I've seen in a long time

in this video she breaks down exactly how most people are using Claude:

- the 14% you lose to CLAUDE.md before typing a word
- the plugins that 95% of users have never installed
- the workflows that run without you typing a single prompt
- why typing one prompt and closing the tab is leaving 90% on the table

if you've been using Claude for months and still start every session from scratch, you have at least 28 untouched features. probably 30

instead of another show tonight, watch this

make sure to bookmark it before it gets lost in your feed

full guide in the article below

[kshitij vaze @VazeKshitij]

I just dropped to my knees at my office

[WorldofAI @intheworldofai]

🚨BREAKING: OpenAI's Codex is now completely FREE to run locally with Ollama.

No API costs. No rate limits. 100% private on your machine.

You can now use both the Codex App and Codex CLI with powerful open-source models like DeepSeek V4, Gemma 4, and Qwen 3.6.

Here's how to set it up in minutes:

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Fascinating chat about Generative Engine Optimization https://t.co/5MM1m4twfV via @YouTube

[Matthew LaBosco @matthew_labosco]

High cortisol is the real reason you wake up at 3-4 AM.

It also shaves 5 years off your life — tanks testosterone, locks belly fat, literally shrinks your brain.

If I wanted to fix it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do every day:

1. No food 3 hours before bed.

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

Obsidian users after reading this:

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Isaac @isaacrrr7]

Piloto colombiano volando a 12.500 pies capturó “la mejor filmación de OVNI jamás vista” y se confirmó su autenticidad.

[David Frosdick @DavidFrosdick]

I did it 👍 thanks @levelsio for sharing.

Setup @Tailscale on my @Hetzner_Online VPS 🙌

Installed @claudeai on VPS 🤞

All my sites run through @Cloudflare tunnels 😎

Got @TermiusHQ running locally on my Mac and iPhone ❤️

Locked all the ports 💪

Migrate 25GB of projects, websites, apps onto my VPS. All MD files there as well 🏋️‍♀️

Then went shopping with the wife while coding from my phone and I’m no coder.

This means I can check daily tasks, fix minor bugs and constantly and work on our main Shopify site.

I’m launching a daily deals section all automated with resend but I can build and tweak that without needing to be at my MacBook.

And if someone says you should be present when shopping. Fuck that. I’m present when 99% around my family and kids.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

💯 same for 🇩🇪

[@levelsio @levelsio]

After this post my Google Maps has now also been banned from reviewing places

No wonder every place is now a 4.7/5, they all converge to that rating if you just remove all the bad ratings

Interestingly, my account has been banned because of my reviews in Dubai from ages ago, I know UAE has strict defamation laws, so I think businesses use that to remove reviews there

I don't know why the Google Maps team is allowing this though, a review or rating is not defamation, it's just an opinion, and Google needs that opinion for people to know where to go

What Google should be doing I think is defending the people who review and rate places in court wherever they live, because by just allowing any business to remove bad ratings/reviews, they make Google Maps completely non-credible!

Long term people will just use other apps to find good places and I don't think you want that @sundarpichai

Maybe we need @X Maps with real reviews @elonmusk?

[Eyad Kelleh @KellehEyad]

Spent the whole night in Composer 2.Spent the whole night in Composer 2.5, just waking up now and honestly, hard to go back. The pace this thing moves at is something else. Same outputs as Codex and Opus, but way faster. Someone explain @cursor_ai ?

[Starter Story @starter_story]

Marc Lou, who built 35 startups, says he doesn't take a single day off — because his fun is literally making stuff.

"I love my day so much that I want to repeat it every single day. I don't like Sundays because my fun is actually making stuff."

"When I go on a holiday, usually I go mad."