Ryan Faust

Get the fundamentals down. If you know only the fundamentals of business, money, health, fitness, relationships, tech, etc, you're way ahead of most people.

@levelsio Create a new anonymous account without ever mentioning who you are. And follow your own advice. Report back with the results. I think you have survivorship bias.

how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding: 1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now 2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend 3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets 4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time 5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users 6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists 7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees. 8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing 9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A 10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start you don't

@petergyang @steipete "flight check-in, home security" These are two major things that I don't trust AI to do. Also, as a human, you should already know that fast food is not good for you. You don't need an AI for that. I'm all for AI, but there are fewer uses for AI than people think.

"This will replace 80% of the apps that you have on your phone." Here's my new episode with @steipete where he showed me: ✅ His personal OpenClaw use cases - flight check-in, home security, and much more ✅ His counterintuitive AI coding workflow - no plan mode, no MCPs, and no fancy prompts ✅ Practical advice for other builders and how to build product taste Some quotes from Peter: "It's like having a new weird friend that is also really smart and resourceful that lives on your computer." "Why should I use MyFitnessPal when I have an infinitely resourceful assistant that already knows I'm making bad decisions at KFC?" "I don't use MCPs or any of that crap. Just because you can build everything doesn't mean you should." 📌 Watch now: youtu.be/AcwK1Uuwc0U Thanks to our sponsors: @meetgranola - The best AI meeting notes app I've ever used: granola.ai/peter @Replit - Create beautiful prototypes and full stack apps: replit.com/?utm_source=cr…

@zarazhangrui Totally agree. Even if you look at the old learning pyramid from the 60s. You see that listening is the least effective way to learn. Learning by doing is second best. The best is teaching others. So in a lecture, the lecturer is learning better than the students.

When trying to learn something, so many people’s first instinct is to - sign up for a course - buy a book When we would be SO much better off if we just - do the f***ing thing that made us wanna learn in the first place - ask AI a ton of questions Figure out the “why”. THEN figure out the “how”.

@webdevcody This is where AI is most useful. Analyzing a large amount of data. Generating something useful has too many options. Aligning the AI output with your vision is a guessing game. But an analysis has very few correct outputs. And AI can easily find them.

A coworker needed help on a bug. They spent multiple days trying to figure it out. I clone their repo and prompt opus 4.5 to fix the bug. I push fix (2 lines of code) Coworker amazed, asks how I figured it out so fast. 😆 There is big money in teaching people the new way.

@jsmasterypro I read and try to understand everything. I use AI as an advisor, not as a worker. If I don't understand something, I talk with AI until I understand. With the exception of deeply technical stuff. Like some complex sorting algorithm that I don't really need to understand.

Do you read/review AI generated code, or just ship it?

@_The_Prophet__ Did you use AI to write this? Sounds just like my ChatGPT.

⚡️AI is not liberating people. It is sorting them. Harder and faster than any technology before it. What you are watching right now is a global intelligence bifurcation that feels empowering on the surface and quietly brutal underneath. Most people think AI removed the need for skill. What it actually removed is the illusion that effort equals value. And that terrifies people more than they are willing to admit. 1. The uncomfortable truth is this: AI exposes who was never thinking in the first place. Before AI, people could hide behind process. They could hide behind effort. They could hide behind time. They could hide behind credentials. They could hide behind busyness. AI strips all of that away. When output becomes cheap, the only thing left is judgment. And judgment cannot be faked. 2. Here is the thing almost nobody wants to say out loud: Most humans do not want agency. They want assisted momentum. They want to feel productive without carrying the weight of responsibility. They want answers without accountability. They want power without authorship. They want speed without ownership of consequences. AI gives them exactly that. Which is why so many people feel euphoric right now. They confuse relief from responsibility with progress. 3. This is where the real danger lives. AI does not make people smarter. It makes their default mode louder. If someone was shallow, they become loudly shallow. If someone was incoherent, they become rapidly incoherent. If someone was dishonest with themselves, they scale self deception. If someone avoided hard thinking, they outsource it permanently. The tool does not correct the operator. It amplifies them. 4. The people who are actually winning right now do not look excited. They look narrower. They look more selective. They look almost conservative in how they move. Because they understand something others do not yet: Speed increases error costs. Leverage magnifies mistakes. Output without understanding compounds fragility. They are not using AI to do more. They are using it to remove noise so they can see reality more clearly. 5. Here is the truth that will make people angry: Most people are becoming interface operators, not thinkers. They can prompt. They can generate. They can remix. They can publish. They cannot explain. They cannot reason from first principles. They cannot detect when something is wrong. They cannot tell signal from fluency. And fluency is the most dangerous camouflage intelligence has ever worn. 6. The deepest layer nobody wants to face: AI makes belief optional. Reality will not. You can generate infinite narratives. You can justify anything. You can create coherence illusions endlessly. But physical systems, markets, biology, power, and scarcity do not care. They select anyway. Quietly. Relentlessly. Without explanation. 7. Here is the final truth, said plainly: AI collapses the middle. At the top are people who can see. At the bottom are people who can operate. The space in between disappears. That middle was where most people lived. That is why this era feels unsettling even when things seem powerful. The question now is simple and brutal: Do you want to think, or do you want to feel assisted? AI will reward either choice in the short term. Only one survives the long term. That is the truth nobody wants to sit with yet.

@burkov People could do this even before AI. Shopify and other no-code tools made it almost just as simple. There were even startups that generated websites from a few answered questions. That said, I use AI all the time and it has its place. But you're overestimating people.

The end of 2025. Web development is a completely solved problem. It's nothing more than HTML markup and connecting various libraries. Chatbots like Opus 4.5 handle that effectively with a minimum of back and forth. It's hard to tell for DBAs and network/system administrators, not my domain, but I think it wouldn't be too difficult for a chatbot to be finetuned to understand how networking works in a specific cloud environment or how to scale a database in this cloud. That's not rocket science. As I have been saying for a couple of years now, manual or semi-manual programming will remain in domains for which we can't find code online. For example, when you have a bank with a mainframe and custom software that balances debits and credits or makes international transactions, using extremely niche APIs. A chatbot there would be not predictable enough. But creating a corporate website or an online store and make it work with some backend like Shopify will work as follows: 1. The client chooses a domain name. 2. The client types what the website should do (e.g. sell items from this Google spreadsheet). 3. The chatbot creates the website and makes it available on this domain name. 4. The client uses the website and tells the chatbot: add this, replace replace this with that, etc.

@chrisgpt To translate this: A skilled person, who knows what he's doing, is using a powerful tool to get more done faster. AI is just another tool. A monkey with the same tool may get lucky, but probably won't get good results.

Claude Code Engineer: “The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is *still* just the beginning.”

One of the saddest thing I see in the indie game dev community as an outsider: People spend years passionately developing their game. Only to end up with 10 downloads.

@haider1 The false hype and people forcing AI into everything is the bubble in my view. AI is immensely useful, but "making everything AI" is not a solution. Like when they tried making an app for everything. Now there's only a handful of apps people actually use.

AI isn't a bubble delusional ppl who don't really understand it keep saying it because they think it'll make others panic-sell but as AI gets integrated into almost everything, they look more delusional over time eventually, the anti-AI crowd will realize they were pushing back against a tool that could help them

@davidpattersonx I think it's the exact opposite. With the direction the world is heading, I don't expect to get any pension. If I can retire at all. The only option is entrepreneurship and living off my own means.

There is no need to save for retirement. Everyone will be permanently retired in a few years and will receive an income for life equal to an average salary today. The average price of everything will be 5% of what it is today, so you will be able to buy twenty times as much.

@TheGeorgePu I needed city locations (coordinates) from a map in a history book. I could have searched the cities manually. But I gave AI a screenshot and told it to find the cities and search online for real coordinates. Output as a GeoJson.

Founders using AI daily: What's one thing AI does for you now that would've taken you hours before? Not hypothetical. What you actually used it for this week.

@theo I think understanding file systems is a basic and transferrable skill. It's basic grouping and categorizing. Like organizing your desk drawers.

Gen Z is right. File systems are bad design. We've stockholm syndrome'd ourselves into thinking otherwise.

@burkov People often think that if they only had this one thing (for example coding skill), they would be a success. But that was not the thing holding them back. Just like access to all the knowledge in the world wasn't the cure for stupid people.

The fact that coding is now available to ~6 billion people connected to the internet, yet it's still only billionaires who are making billions, is proof that it was never about a lack of skills. It has been and still is about a lack of new ideas. A comparison of the AI bubble to the dotcom bubble is grossly incorrect. During the dotcom bubble, the Web was bursting with ideas. The internet was just too small for all of them to survive long enough. Today, the Web is as big as it could physically be, but there isn't a single new idea.

@petergyang While technical people feel they are behind, non-technical people fall into delusion. They start thinking they can build anything. An autopilot can fly in a straight line better than a human pilot. But non-pilots still can't fly a plane even with an autopilot.

Two great engineers reflecting on how the profession is fundamentally changing with AI

@codewithDiyaa A client just sent me their vibe coded MVP. It was a HTML file with 10k lines of code. They said AI won't make changes anymore, for some reason.

Does vibe coding really work?

@jakobgreenfeld They do. Basically any public email is being abused. I've been cc'd to emails that were sent to the prime minister. Sent by some wacko.

it still blows my mind you can message almost anyone on earth for free and barely anyone does

@jackfriks You fell right into their trap. Now they know that that key is not yours. If you answer them 2 quindecillion more times, they will eventually land on the real key.

I just got 250k views in 6h on my Reddit post. Maybe I'm starting to believe in marketing.

@wesbos Not a single one. And I use AI all the time. Current free models are already good enough for almost everything I want them to do.

what AI apps are you paying for rn?