Josh Brake

So disappointing, @Anthropic. 95% of my usage of my usage of Claude Code is in @conductor_build. Seems absurd that this is now going to be effectively billed as API use.

Worth a read here from @tobi. Interesting to think about what this would look like in a classroom: you can use AI however you want, but must use it in public so everyone else can see the interactions.

I understand the general sentiment that one way to combat the temptation for our students to outsource their work to AI is to move the work in class. But shouldn’t the real goal be to help them build the character and grit needed to resist the temptation and do the work even outside of the perfectly curated environment? We can and should attend to the environment to help our students grow, but it cannot stop there. We need to help our students to grow to love the work for its own sake, to experience the deep joy of struggling with ideas and work that is worthwhile, to build not only the raw skills that are part of an intellectually rich life, but to help them to learn how to cultivate their own energy, environment, and engagement. I’m not interested in letting the specter of AI’s temptation restrict my imagination about what my students can be and do. If they can only do the work in class, I will count that as a failure and loss on both of our parts.

Holy memory leak, Batman. Some things not even 128GB of RAM can save you from.

The Sam Altman and @miramurati texts from the day he got fired from @OpenAI in 2023 just became evidence in the @elonmusk v. @sama trial. It felt like a meaningful moment in AI history, so I turned it into a musical. The lyrics are the texts.

The analogy of coding agents as a higher abstraction level compiler really does hit IMO.

@mackenzieprice Yeager is excellent on this.

The cultural pendulum has swung toward lower and lower expectations for kids, disguised as "kindness" or "gentleness." But unfortunately, it's not doing today's students any justice. Kids rise to whatever standards are placed upon them, and high standards are what set kids up for real success. David Yeager calls it the Mentor Mindset: high standards paired with high support. Drop the standards and you've told kids you don't believe in them. Raise the bar without helping them get there and now they don't believe in themselves. High standards with high support is the sweet spot that helps kids develop genuine agency, competence, and belief. We've lowered the bar out of love, but it's time we raise it out of respect.

The @The7Line has got to have a new @Mets t-shirt with pulchritudinous and a picture of Gary on the front, right? Take my money.

Saw this in person from the top deck. What a lay out.

@heynavtoor Docuseal rocks.

DocuSign Personal: $10 to $15 per month. DocuSign Standard: $25 to $45 per user per month. DocuSign Business Pro: $40 to $65 per user per month. A 10-person team on Business Pro pays $4,800 to $7,800 a year. To put signatures on PDFs. A team of 50 pays $24,000 to $39,000 a year. And there is a 100-envelopes-per-year cap on most plans. Send more contracts and you pay extra. Need SMS delivery? $0.40 per send. Need ID verification? $2.50 per attempt. Need premium support? $5,000 to $50,000 per year add-on. You are rationing digital signatures in 2026. DocuSign is a $10 billion company built entirely on this pricing model. Now meet DocuSeal. A free and open source alternative to DocuSign. Created in 2023 by a Ruby developer named Alex who was simply trying to sign one document and realised every solution online was overpriced or required a subscription. Three weeks later he had a working alternative. He pushed it to GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license. Today it has 11,800+ stars and over 1,000 forks. Bootstrapped. No VCs. No paywalls. Here is what DocuSeal does: - Upload any PDF and turn it into a fillable, signable form - Drag and drop signature fields, dates, checkboxes, file uploads, and 13 field types - Send to multiple signers with custom signing order - Automated email reminders - Mobile signing on any device - PDF signature verification built in - Audit trail for every document - Bulk send and templates - Full API access - Self-host with one Docker command Here is what DocuSeal costs: Zero. Forever. Unlimited documents. Unlimited signers. Unlimited storage. DocuSign limits envelopes. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign charges per SMS. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign charges for ID checks. DocuSeal doesn't. DocuSign sees your contracts on their servers. DocuSeal doesn't. Here is the wildest part: The median DocuSign contract per Vendr is $17,250 per year. One Reddit thread has people saying "they want me to pay $4.80 per e-signature." Self-host DocuSeal on a $5 cloud server and a 50-person team can sign as many contracts as they want without paying a single dollar. Your contracts never leave your server. Your client lists. Your NDAs. Your employment agreements. None of it touches a third-party company. For individuals who only sign a few contracts a year, you save $180. For small teams of 10, you save up to $7,800 a year. For a 50-person company, you save up to $39,000 a year. Your documents. Your signatures. Your server. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

If you skip some or all of college to start a startup, it's on you to develop your mind the way college would have. And that's not something that happens by default in most startups.

What if the real value of that research paper is tied to wrestling with it over an extended period of time? What about getting to the finish line stronger rather than faster? Always ask: "To what problem is this the solution?"

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1: Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight? Me: Yes they're done. Partner: Why are they still dirty? Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

Software is eating the world, and us along with it.

The Montreal Expos are exiting the baseball space. During Q2 and Q3 2026, we will transition to acquiring high-performance GPU assets. This is all part of our long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.

After decades of working with leaders at companies like Apple, Salesforce, and Cisco, we've identified 4 storytelling techniques that consistently work to deliver important messages in high-stakes settings: 1. Start with the unexpected Don’t begin your presentation with context. Instead, begin with the moment that makes people think, “Wait…what?” Instead of something like: “Here’s an update on our September campaign…” Try starting with the most interesting detail: “I broke our biggest marketing rule last month, and it worked.” Lead with the surprise. You can add context later. 2. Let people feel the tension After the surprise, don’t rewind to the beginning. Take your audience to the moment where things weren’t working. Flat numbers. Missed goals. Stalled progress. Instead of: “The campaign was underperforming, and our team went back to the drawing board.” Try: "We were two weeks out from the end of the quarter. The campaign wasn’t producing results, and the team was out of ideas. That’s when I decided to take a risk...” You don’t need to explain the problem. You need to make people feel it. 3. Use real dialogue When your audience hears what was actually said, they stop listening to you and start visualizing the moment. This helps them connect emotionally with what you’re saying. Instead of: “The campaign manager said team morale was low and they were struggling to find a solution.” Try: “My campaign manager pulled me aside in the hallway and said, ‘We’ve tried everything. The team has been working overtime, and we don’t know what else to do.’” Dialogue brings listeners into the moment with you. It makes the story real. 4. Share the lesson Never assume people will infer the meaning you intended. End your story by answering: - What does this mean? - How should someone act differently now? Example: “Breaking our biggest marketing rule helped us turn this campaign around and hit our numbers. I strongly suggest we revisit our marketing guidelines. We could be leaving a ton of revenue on the table.” Without the lesson being clear, even a good story feels unfinished. These are the same techniques we teach to our clients at Duarte. Try them out during your next presentation and watch how people lean forward and tune in to your message

Now in research preview: routines in Claude Code. Configure a routine once (a prompt, a repo, and your connectors), and it can run on a schedule, from an API call, or in response to an event. Routines run on our web infrastructure, so you don't have to keep your laptop open.

@aakashgupta Zuck will once again be bitten by the curse of not owning the platform.

Apple just mass-shelved a $3,500 headset, dissolved the entire team that built it, and is now building glasses that do less than Meta's $299 Ray-Bans. And the math says this is the smartest hardware decision they've made in years. Vision Pro shipped 390,000 units in 2024. Then 45,000 in Q4 2025. Production halted. Marketing cut by 95%. The dedicated Vision Products Group was dissolved and folded into standard hardware divisions. Apple killed the product without saying the word. Meanwhile Meta sold 7 million smart glasses last year. Tripled their entire prior sales in a single year. They're targeting 20 million units by end of 2026. EssilorLuxottica's stock hit record highs. Here's what Apple actually learned from the Vision Pro failure: the market doesn't want a computer on your face. It wants a computer that looks like your face already has something on it. 300 million Americans wear corrective lenses. The addressable market for "glasses that also do AI stuff" is 100x the addressable market for "headset that replaces your monitor." The four frame styles tell you everything. Wayfarer shape, Tim Cook's slim rectangles, large ovals, small ovals. Acetate instead of plastic. Multiple colors. Apple studied how people already buy eyewear and reverse-engineered a tech product into that behavior. The constraint nobody is talking about: these glasses require an iPhone. That's the entire strategy. AirPods made switching from iPhone painful. Apple Watch made it worse. Glasses that see the world through Siri and relay everything through your phone? That's the final lock-in device. Every pair sold is an iPhone retention contract worth $1,000+ per year in services and upgrades. Meta built a standalone product. Apple is building a retention moat you wear on your face 16 hours a day.

Tomorrow.