Automate With David

I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this..... But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software. I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it. He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code. Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time. His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages. His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five." Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder. I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.

1 million context window: Now generally available for Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6.

There are multiple $1B+ opportunities to build managed AI agent "swarms" for specific industry verticals. Here's how I think about it: After just a few days toying around with agents, it's clear to me that the biggest challenge for adoption from non-tech companies/people isn't around initial deployment. It's going to be actually getting value out of the agents after they're deployed. You might be able to build and deploy an agent, but what the hell do you do with it after it's deployed? How do you train it to get better? What are the use cases that are most valuable for your industry? What are the latest skills that it needs to function at a 10/10 level? Without that, you're just going to have a bunch of fancy looking AI agents gathering dust on the shelves because you have no clue how to get any value out of them. That's the opportunity... Here's how you grab it: Pick a valuable industry vertical. Let's say finance. Build an agent "swarm" that is hyper-specific to that industry use case. So, for finance, it might be around modeling, industry case studies, company analysis, document review, etc. Hire a handful of ex-finance folks (or get them at a high hourly rate in their off-time). Use their industry expertise to train the agents on the initial expertise plus to refine them on an ongoing basis. You could niche down even further and choose one specific use case for an initial land grab (i.e. a modeling agent swarm or a loan analysis agent swarm). Deploy the agents the same way a staffing firm would deploy into a company. You could charge a one-time implementation plus ongoing annual license fee. Continue to manage and improve the agents using the data and insights coming back from customers. Manage them, keep them up to date, fix any issues. Customer is happy because they get the benefits of the transformative tech and cost savings without having to understand the tech or improve it. You're happy because you are making money (and doing something pretty cool). You could probably replicate this exact playbook across a long list of verticals (hence why I think there are multiple $1B+ opportunities). Just a thought...