Sean Kaye

You should be writing longer form tweets. Period. I'm not going to be one of those Twitter Bros with my 850-person account telling you how to grow to be massive, but here's what I've seen. Let me explain... @paulmetcalfe tagged me in a comment and asked what I'd seen, so I started writing out my thoughts and rationale as to why I started going down this path. First off, I hate threads. I think the UX is janky as both a reader and someone writing them. I find the constant breaks distracting and disjointed. Your entire writing style tends to change because you're trying to hook and lead the reader in EVERY individual tweet so that they keep reading. So, I don't like reading them and I don't like writing them, and that's the #1 reason I avoid them. Plus, I'm verbose, so I like writing longer form. Now, before I get into any of this, remember, my account is "petite" - it's at 860ish people and was at 325 when I started experimenting with longer-form tweets. Take that into consideration - small sample size. Back in April, I noticed that if I wrote more than 280 characters and people clicked the "Show More" link to read the entire tweet, I got more impressions. That's the genesis of it. I didn't need any advanced calculus to work it out - writing more, telling a longer story, people who were interested clicked "Show More" and Twitter showed the whole tweet to more people it seemed. My hypothesis was that it was what I called "Dwell Time" - the more people read my single tweets, the more "value" Twitter seemed to place on it. Sort of like a silent engagement signal. Obviously clicking on the "Show More" link was proper engagement signal to Twitter that people were interested in what I was writing, so no real need to explain that. This is where I think it gets more interesting. Then I put on my nerd hat and realized that from purely a "cost of compute" resources, it would be cheaper for Twitter to show long-form posts rather than threads in terms of calls to their data and presentation servers. Based on that, I had a hunch a month ago that we'd see threads be pushed down the "algorithmic ranking signals" in favour of longer-form tweets because it's cheaper for Twitter AND it means people dwell on a tweet long. Longer dwell time is more likely to result in some kind of engagement happening - a like, a retweet, or hopefully a reply. I think replies are the magic "GO" button - why do I think that? What is Twitter going to pay creators out for? Ads displayed in the comments on a post. They are financially rewarding you for having people comment on your stuff - I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is probably a strong signal that Twitter values this. So as a strategy to complement that, I started replying to almost everything on my tweets - again, being a small account makes that easy, but I actively did it and I told people I was doing it. That creates more conversation, etc... My account had tripled in size off a small base, my tweets will easily get over 1m impressions this month in total, and considering that I went from about 350 followers a month ago to 860something today, that's a fair amount of impressions. The content is the content - it obviously plays a big role, but the strategy for that was pretty simple: "Say the shit out loud that other people are thinking but are too shy or unwilling to say because they don't want the blowback." I decided to just be honest. People talk about "being authentic" and then write rubbish platitudes. I shit post and toss out contrarian views. I don't care if people like me or not. I don't care if people agree with me or not. I wanted to have fun and say what was on my mind while pointing out the absurdity of a lot of what I was seeing based on nearly 20 years of doing stuff like this. Seems to be resonating with other people, who knows. I'd like to say I sat down and mapped this all out, but I didn't - most of it came to me while I was standing in the sun, out for a walk, lifting weights, or sitting on the toilet - the places where I do my best thinking. And without being egotistical at all, I think I have a pretty decent grasp of human psychology, so I tend to know what buttons to press. In summary, why do I think that long-form content is working for me? It's a confluence of things. It's tactics. It's strategy. It's understanding people. It's being willing to call bullshit on things in a fun way without being a crass asshat. And most importantly, it's being willing to try things and see how they work. This is working, you should try it if you're interested. Or don't. I don't care. Keep writing threads.

@scottjduffy @HwoodScrptReadr I wrote a TV Series / Podcast this year in the form of a book. Absolutely zero expectation of ever monetizing it. If I can turn it into a live action series at a high quality and stick it on YT, I will absolutely do it. It’s good, if I do say so myself. Hollywood is cooked.

@HwoodScrptReadr Who cares about "monetizing it"? I want to take my favorite book that isn't a movie, and see it as a movie. I want to see a movie that I didn't like the ending of, and have a different ending. I will use AI to create entertainment for myself. I am not competing with a studio.

All these posts about how AI is going to destroy Hollywood because soon you'll be able to make an entire feature film on your laptop with only a few prompts. What a bunch of bullshit. Leaving aside the fact that most of these reels people are posting look like hot garbage. We all know it's going to get better and better. Movies are still star driven. Tom Cruise might sell his likeness someday but you'll never be able to afford it and if you use it without permission you'll never be able to monetize it. Or you'll just get sued. What about animated or fully digital films? They still use actors whose names you all know to do the voices. Even AVATAR uses real actors for motion capture. Why? Because acting is a talent. But here's the part everybody forgets. If you have access to all this technology then so does Hollywood and their tech will always be much much better than yours. Suddenly, you're not competing with these bloated $100M+ productions. It gets cheaper and easier for them too. So any advantage you think you may have had has evaporated just like that. Anyway that's not the hard part. It never was. Movies are about more than spectacle. Otherwise we could sit there and watch car crashes and explosions for two hours. What's required is storytelling ability. Invest your time in learning that rather than the latest AI image generator. I have no doubt that these platforms will enable people to do amazing things with them. But at the end of the day the only ones who get rich off of this won't be you. It'll be the platforms themselves.

Terrible week for Anthropic that could get even worse. The whole thing with Peter Steinberger going to OpenAI was just a bad look. If Hegseth deems them a “Supply Chain Risk” as is being threatened, that’s basically a death sentence for the company. Amodei should stop staring into his own navel on podcasts and waxing philosophically and start running his company better.

@scottjduffy @Simon_Ingari One person I know got a signing bonus as his new job big enough to surpass his lost LTI’s.

@SeanDoesLife @Simon_Ingari Don't they usually lock those people in with financial penalties like vesting periods for stock options and restricted stock units? So you can leave, but you're also leaving $1 million behind.

HR: What is your notice period? Candidate: 60 days. HR: Is it negotiable? Candidate: No. HR: Sorry, we’re looking for someone who can join within 30 days. Candidate: May I ask a question? HR: Sure. Candidate: What’s the notice period in your company? HR: 90 days. Candidate: If someone resigns and requests to leave within 30 days, would you allow it? HR: No, we require time to find a replacement and ensure proper knowledge transfer. Candidate: Then why is it fair to expect new hires to join early when existing employees can’t leave early?

I have a similar framework for looking at conspiracy theories now. I assume it's true and place scrutiny on the claims made to disprove it. If the attacking claims withstand scrutiny, then you can proceed to evaluate the theory against the counterclaim. That said, any idea that's just stochastic gibberish, I discount out of hand until I see it clarified.

I just assume all "conspiracy theories" are true by default until proven otherwise

@BenSettle @stefaniasettle I'd be afraid of saying that to a Latinx woman.

Every time I cheat on @stefaniasettle and she's about to complain, I put my forefinger over her lips and say, "choose your next words very carefully."

I build actual things with AI every day. It's simultaneously overhyped and underrated. I've done high-end technology for decades - I built one of the first wide-scale dial-up internet services in 1993, was a beta test for Microsoft .Net, I was an early customer of AWS EC2 & S3 in late-2006, was building SaaS products around that time... I've been at the edge of every tech trend for the last over 30 years. AI scares me. Legitimately. Our understanding of market economics is not prepared for it. It is the most value-destructive force I've ever thought possible short of some kind of cataclysmic natural event. Anyone who asks, I tell them to hoard cash like toilet paper in early 2020.

It's long been the fake vax of tech. Treated as religion amongst the terminally online, with everyone who questions the hype branded as heretic, and cognitive dissonance created when its bogus prophecies don't happen.

@scottjduffy @Simon_Ingari Two people I know, both VP level to be fair, just had to work out their 90-day notice periods.

@Simon_Ingari In 20+ years, I've never worked anywhere that had a notice period. I used to give 2 weeks as a fair amount of time, but 60 days? 90 days? Is that a thing?

@scottjduffy If you're anything like me you spend your time wondering which tool to use.

With Claude Cowork now on Windows, I've now got paid subscriptions to all of the major AI companies. What do I win? 👾🤖🏆

@BenSettle The only people mad about this are the usual suspects. I was married for 10 years before she was even born. I now feel old.

that's my boy

Been sorting through this Opus 4.6 token consumption issue for the last few days. I'm finding that it desperately wants to read your entire codebase before going into planning mode and then reads MORE of the codebase after. It's the single area where I'm seeing tokens burn - reading the codebase and looking at unnecessary elements.

@glennwrites1 @AuthorGFAllen And further to that, if you write a lot and then read back what you’ve written out loud, your writing improves astronomically.

@AuthorGFAllen If you had identical twins, one prolific reader, and one who never read, the first would be a better writer. Mirror neurons.

Does reading a lot naturally improve writing ability?

@WiFiMoneyGuy A year ago, he was telling people to be reply guys on Twitter for money. Why would anyone take serious technology advice from him? Nice guy, very keen, but he’s an online marketer.

You're a FOOL. The blind leading the blind.

@scottjduffy @venturetwins I know of multiple Fortune 500 company CIOs asking questions about ServiceNow, Workday, etc.

@venturetwins I think the risk is that someone in IT (the intern!) replicates an app that the company is paying $5 million per year for with a good enough replacement, and they seriously consider bringing it in-house to save that money.

I love how everyone is saying "SaaS is dead" like you're going to get the Fortune 500 to ditch Salesforce for a CRM vibecoded by a 13-year-old

I would be willing to test that theory if you could spot me a billion or so.

After a full day of using Claude Code with Opus 4.6, the difference feels minimal. Opus 4.5 was already great. But man, 4.6 chugs tokens. My Claude Max account copped a beating today.

I agree. At some point this year, agent orchestration will become standard. I have built a health assistant project in Claude that I chat with and give data to during the day. It identified I was having trouble getting good sleep if I was working on things “late” and it asked if I wanted it to setup an Apple Reminder at 10:30pm for me to wind down. I didn’t even know it had access to that. LOL.

@SeanDoesLife I think an AI agent (that you own and control) proactively reaching out to you (even if it's on a schedule) will become popular in 2026. Like, "Hey Sean, it's been 6 days since you assigned this work to your employee. Today might be good to check in with them."

I love Claude. I spend a lot of time every day in Claude Code for work. Yesterday I saw some IAC done using Clawdbot at a client. Environment variables hardcoded into the Terraform. No tests. None. The internet is going to be a zoo in the next 6 months.

@GaelBreton I think if you’ve invested in building your systems and workflows around Claude Code, changing the Codex would be marginal gain. I’d rather just hammer nails than try every hammer at the hardware store if I already have a great hammer.

I agree. Codex with the new app is a really nice way of coding. I’ll still use Claude code for everything else though.

@SahilBloom @BillAckman People who fall for this stuff have an exceptional low directional IQ on the topic. He can be as smart as you like but on this topic, he’s simply out of his depth and everything looks like sorcery.

@BillAckman No basis for this but whenever I see something like this I default assume someone just prompted/created it to get engagement. Or the bot knows what will get engagement and does the same and it’s the most elegant marketing ever.

The singularity appears to be here.

@BenSettle You sir, have the lobes.

Moot point in my Ferengi household

@FindJimClair It actually holds up well through a few seasons as well. But yeah, it’s not The Sopranos. One show I did like that I watched this week is “Paradise”. It was surprisingly good.

Do not sleep on Boardwalk Empire. I recently watched it with my wife. The first season was acclaimed but then Game of Thrones stole the show for the rest. The sets are fantastic, superb performances, and great writing. Plenty of what makes good drama: choice and repression, classic themes, psychological themes, and so on. It's not as great as the Sopranos, but it definitely holds a candle to it.