SWL Week in Review - Bot or Not

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

3/28/2026, 11:16 PM

Dave and I went skiing… so the ladies invited some other non-sam-dave people on the podcast. Henrik and Ben on something called ?“donkeycorns”? … will watch it on the flight home because airplane wifi is actually starting to work (and yes, I 100% will pay more and choose my airline based on who has starlink… way beyond any other amenity (although this United 3 seat coach bed option is pretty cool)…. Airlines are just moving ISPs now.

Hot Takes

Join The 2 Day Creator-Bot School — this two day SF event is going to be really excellent… if you are a creator and interested in leveraging AI you should join… We have excellent tech TAs joining, the tool chain we are going to help people with is wildly powerful if you have a community you want to super-charge… Goals dramatically deeper sense of what you can do with AI beyond ChatGPT… Build something actually valuable with TA support in our hackathon, and learn from each other — I am legitimately excited to do this and participate — list of folks joining is great.

Requestclip.com — (FKA bot or not) Increasingly I have no idea when I get pitches or job applications what is a real human and what is a bot… so I built my personal solution, requestclip.com (you can use it too) … It makes it insanely easy to reply and ask folks to submit a short video as proof of humanity and intent OR / AND collect short pitches, applications, etc… obviously with speech-to-text, summarization, sharing and tagging functionality and everything else you would expect in 2026. It is AMAZING to me that I did this in probably a sum total of an hour or so… the whole app was built and deployed functional with a single prompt to Claude. It is insane to me that software is this easy to build (and useful!)…

Speaking of AI & Vibe Coding… — I spent the whole week with normies / great people who not connected to SV. Once Dave left, it was just me and this riff raff… Key insights:
- (1) SEO/ SEM disasters for Claude & Openclaw — one very smart guy said, ‘I paid for Claude and Openclaw’ and neither work…. Turns out he had been suckered by google SEM to use things he thought were those two services but in fact were not. The SEM / SEO wars of ver both ‘claude’ and ‘open claw’ to redirect you to money making scheme junk right now is WILD — scammer’s paradise.
- (2) AI app building blows non-tech minds. Over the week I helped non technical people build 3 apps they wanted (one quite serious / real)… the fact that even with people that don’t have app experience the pipeline of (A) record granola discussion (B) one-prompt Cluade (with my tools setup admittedly) to generate a fully functional app (C) Give GitHub access and let them refine on their own with Claude — works insanely well (seriously) and is a real mind-f for everyone. I couldn’t be more bullish on everyone being able to building the software they want / need for themselves AND the fact that software itself is totally worthless. I have vibe coded a lot of things for myself, but seeing people just ‘talk’ knowing nothing about apps and get full fledged good functioning apps out the back end in minutes was WILD even to me.
- (3) If you just sit back and enjoy it - god Grok is just an absolute riot — introducing it to people who aren’t fully desensitized and jaded is a total joy.

Every consumer category should have 100x price difference from cheapest to most expensive — it isn’t necessarily good for the world, but it is where we are at… if inequality is what it is (and growing) then the market is split — one incentive is to go for minimum cost, the other is maximum quality regardless of price. Price x Quantity isn’t about maxing both (you can’t) … it is about leaning hard on one or the other, and there is SOOO much white space at high end of “actual quality” vs. just marketing. You CAN make 100x better toilet paper… if you just have some imagination.. and milk? (As some indigent twitter person commented) — for sure you can have milk that costs 100x and is better (more on that soon)

LLMs on Drugs — hallucinations are a service … great for script punch-ups, etc. Someone needs to stop fighting them and instead make them way way better.

Can I victory lap SaaS is Dead Yet?… to be clear, I meant to call Harry Stebbing’s co-hosts indignant, not indigent… but that is what I get for writing this tweet in an A-star taking off to disappear for hours into the woods.

Evals are Just Tests Rebranded — everyone is so into this ‘evals are everything’ — code by specifying the evals… which sounds very cool, and is one heck of a rebrand from TDD / test driven development,… which despite being pretty much the same thing is lame-sauce.

Best,

Sam

P.S. The currency of fun — this week was mostly about fun with Jet-A in the mountains…

P.P.S - Trainwreck: Poop Cruise… I haven’t seen it yet… but it comes highly recommended from people I highly respect.

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A paid word from sponsors (LOL) Actual humans have asked to pay me to sponsor my newsletter… which I do find hilarious… but I am a capitalist — here is a word from a sponsor, like a real one I don’t even have equity in / know as a personal friend:

getviktor.com— the managed answer to the OpenClaw question. An AI coworker in Slack that connects to all your tools, builds apps, writes code, runs reports. No CLI, no config. Install and go.

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P.P.P.S I do find the fact that all AI news is coming through Twitter to be an interesting moment… right now twitter is the most important professional network / tool out there…. Hilariously Elon wins again.

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