SWL Week in Review - Claude Week

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

3/6/2026, 9:45 PM(5 hours ago)

Why aren’t the Silicon Valley engineers freaking out at Claude? Lack of union (like Hollywood)… or is freaking out admitting you are scared you aren’t good enough to be in the minority of engineers who will make more money vs. getting axed?! Also more on the ‘triangle trade’ , what happens to ‘code wins arguments’ now, please ‘stop building what customers tell you to’ , Josh Wolfe, .. great services are NOT great businesses… and ‘hard’ isn’t a moat

My Claude Coding Extravaganza Week

At this point I am on an orgy-of-coding once every six months or so… it was time — and you know what… the tools have massively improved in the last 6 months. It is pretty mind-blowing… and the ‘panic’ / fire all the p50 engineers thing… makes total sense. Here is what I build with at most half attention while on calls this week… and it is ALL fun

More or Less - Always On News Commentary — hourly refreshes the tech news… bot-jess picks the topic, we all debate … you can like and comment! It is pretty good, tho jess bot is really stuck on / obsessed with Anthropic-Pentagon.

AI More or Less Podcasts - Our Personalities and Voices — builds an entire podcast (including our voices as audio) and makes pretty believable / good version of our weekly podcast on the news. Lots of good insights in there and credible presentation.

More or Less Chat — Chat With Us — log in and have a full conversation with ALL of us… we give you our views on the world / perspectives…

MOLsay — a human-only social network stub — what if you made a social network that only allowed you to access content by sharing real human insight. Log in, share a thoughts… validate its likeliness to be uniquely human — if so / if it is then share the feed of other actually human insights

Fix my personal homepage / sambot — new and improved…. Sambot... and if you get special permission a chat-interface for my full personal CRM as well… but that is just for VIPs lol.

Pay People for Insights on Solana Rails — with my private CRM I can ask of 50,000 enriched people ‘who knows about what’. Etc... and auto fire off questions to them over email— the best part, with Solana wallets wired up — payout works as thank you / bounties with frames.

Flatter Bot -funny enough… we did some short podcasts / sound clippings for a ‘highlight reel’ this week… which meant getting a bunch of very flattering notes from people we work with — so lets automate it. Here is a podcast episode generated from one command with my friends saying very nice things about me for an hour.… I also made them for Dave, Jess, and Brit — and I think ‘flattery as a service’ is a thing. It is wild that these are all one prompt runs… ‘make flattery’ - on MOL

This is all not even to mention what I setup for Jessica for actual business purposes … and the guide ClaudeMaxx (h/t to retardmaxx) … on how to string together GitHub, PSQL / Opensearch, a cloud server, vercel dev browser, some cookies, and pdl/clearbit to run everything.

the take away in all of this.... it finally works... for realz. Using it very well still requires knowing something about how the internet actually works and some technical tools, but give it like 2 months.

Hot Takes

DARK POOLS NOT ‘MARKETS’— is the correct business model for the AI future. I love dark pools … (I actually convinced a firm that was going to be called light pool to be honest and name themselves dark pool, which they did!) — but this is the future of all value in the AI age in marketplaces. You don’t want to be the apple tree where everyone ‘gathers’ to meet and trade… you want to be the secret index / have access to the secret knowledge of who is in the market and uniquely how to cross transactions for non-standard goods (information, contracts, ownership, etc. more efficiently) — people are peaking at this (i.e. open-router ‘just pick for me’ — but this is THE defensible pattern… build trust / get people to tell you things they won’t tell anyone else - have information no one else has… be better at making markets and transactions between people (see what is happening with VC, for starters and ‘trade routes’) — but the pattern is everywhere. See yah later ebay.

Or should we call it AI Oracles (private information laundering) - I love oracles… who doesn’t — some crazy people hopped up on fumes… that everyone decided to trust and tell all their secrets to — and then they just sat there and marketed the information back to others / made the market of war and history… the ORACLE is the model of AI / the future… still annoyed that domain isn’t for sale (along with everyone else) — ... names matter.

Token-Nepo-Babies — a friend showed me the text request from his son for more tokens to use in his account… it struck me — this for kids really will be a new source of inequality — did your parents give you / can you afford an infinite token balance or not?

More Writing != More Scribes — more calculating doesn’t mean more hidden figures… stop confusing more code with more engineers, and get excited that an esoteric form of typing that was once a huge bottleneck for most people is actually now blown away…. That is, unless your edge was that bottleneck — that isn’t exciting.

And LOL Apple — here is an idea, rather than BUYING $100B of AI infra… why don’t we sell our customers $100B of AI infra — I continue to take real pleasure in watching them thumb their noses at everyone…. I can’t believe at every turn they end up selling more Mac minis.

I hated pure software before it was cool… now what — I don’t think I am ready to like software yet… lol. But I just want to remind everyone that for the last several years I have been hating on pure software businesses — and you know who is crushing it (crushing it) are these creators we are invested in that are now high agency and claude coding like you wouldn’t believe. The trusted cult leaders shall inherit the earth.

It all reduces to monopoles or energy — Chinese models crunching over night with worse chips and cheap power…. Big theme on more or less… do you even need the best models? No… use cheaper dirtier ones and just grind it out with cheap energy. This is the opposite of the AGI race future we were promised by excellent fundraisers— this is the grinding reality of ‘abundant intelligence’ that looks like electricity… but costs less to move globally (damn superconductivity).

Instead of sell one product to everyone, sell everything to one small community. — fun way to phrase the cult shift… anything that everyone wants will be too competitive / margins go to zero — capitalism works and tends towards zero profit (as it is meant to) — the way to build? Be the trusted node and sell the people that trust you everything.

Purim — history rhymes… unbelievably… millennia apart. It isn’t jewish Halloween… it is a wildly interesting biblical story about power without sovereignty, narrative warfare.. identity, agency vs. luck, resilience… and the times when it is important to show strength and take up arms… and threat reversal… also only loosely related — you have to appreciate the competence and tone of the armed forces in the middle of the wildness of politics. .. that is the calmest ‘epic fury’ imaginable.

Polymath & Pilcrow — if you made it here… you should probably check this out… it might be important for late ¶ — just sayin.

New Fund Alert — Kushner, Musk & Altman — congrats to these three on the quickest fundraise in history.

Tennis Time -- Ta Ta,
Sam

P.S. I should have known the world Fra'yer / פראייר. Before... and who doesn’t appreciate a good LEROY JENKINS

P.P.S did you know that granola is good at pilates?

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