Fuad Kamal @flexRonin

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!

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It used to be I really enjoyed post production film work, but had to wait on long render times. Now Claude is waiting on me, and I have twenty different things in five different projects going on at the same time. Now the human is the new bottleneck. And ADD is now a superpower

Men's searches for "running club" are up 749% (Pinterest, via Fitt Insider). My cycling club just sent 27 riders into the Shenandoahs with no SAG. Every fitness data model still assumes one person, one session. The group is the surge. #FitnessTech #Wearables

Readiness. Sleep score. Health Age. Labs from the app. If you wear a @WHOOP or @Oura, nothing in @Apple's Health news was new. Same Quest needle, same "years younger" line. What matters is what the app does with the result the next morning. That loop is still WHOOP's.

Build an MCP into your products that exposes logs so that your agents can self heal when things go wrong. App breaks/something didn't work? Ask the agent to look at its own logs, investigate, and fix itself. Add in web hooks and you have a full autonomous self healing system.

@unclebobmartin I don’t grok it 😂

@danellisona What if you’re the founder of a sleep lab? 😂

Your input needed: would you use this? This is an early look at how we're thinking about making Claude Code way more extensible. It's a little crazy, and very exciting. More details here: github.com/anthropics/cla…

ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs

2 months ago

We're exploring a new way to let you extend and customize Claude Code: Function Hooks. Here's a couple videos showing what you'd be able to do. It hasn't shipped yet, we'd love feedback on this on our GitHub issue.

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@WHOOP make an MCP so @claudeai can read my morning journal and update my Whoop journal for me.

@TedCruz1072676 Or, if you’re incredibly technical and already on the edge of AI, already pruning clients for better growth…find some amazing mentors who can help you strategize and focus your direction. Have any tips for finding great mentorship?

Everyone is pointing the same agents at the same code. Compose Multiplatform 1.12 ships an MCP server so agents can drive your running app. The loop is table stakes. What you keep out of it is the product. What's off-limits to your agents?

Every client meeting: OBS or Audio Hijack → MacWhisper → PDF → Claude project + Bear notebook → Claude writes the markdown back into Bear. Bear MCP + Notion MCP means I never paste context. The model isn't the interesting part. The chain of custody is.

Tinder auto-resolved 500+ Xcode 26 upgrade issues with Cursor. The model didn't do that. A decade of hermetic Bazel builds and a snapshot harness did — they made every patch machine-checkable in CI. Without that layer, AI just moves the chaos around. lnkd.in/p/e5-GpUZj

Anthropic deleted ~80% of Claude Code's system prompt for Opus 5. Method: ablation. Delete everything, add lines back one at a time, keep only what still earns its place. The rule that makes it work: add back only on repeated failure. Never on prediction.

Anthropic's Opus 5 prompting guide is mostly a list of things to delete. Verification steps. "Double-check your answer." Every one now costs you output instead of buying it. An instruction written for a model's weakness becomes a tax when it's fixed.

ChatGPT convinced it’s rude by Claude youtube.com/shorts/urZzqkr… via @YouTube 🤣🤣🤣😹

A state-of-the-art AI model went dark for every customer on earth at 5:21 PM ET on a Friday. Not deprecated — ordered offline. If a core dependency vanished today, how fast would your product recover? My take on the Fable 5 / Mythos 5 directive: linkedin.com/posts/anaara_a…

Apple built its new foundation models in a "deep collaboration with Google" — on the tech behind Gemini. The most vertically integrated company in tech, partnering with its biggest rival on the model layer. Pragmatism over pride. Full take: linkedin.com/posts/anaara_w…

@gittower I wrote about it here: linkedin.com/posts/anaara_c…

Tower 15 for Mac is officially here! 🥳 This release introduces full macOS 26 support and powerful features to keep your branches clutter-free. BTW, Tower is 30% off this week for new customers 😉 Let's see what's new! 🧵 1/9