Ancil Thomas

“They generate outputs, instead first trying shape the problem or the form to the real conditions of the problem.” An empty chat box naturally nudges you to solution mode. It’s missing a problem exploration mode, a Socratic mode, where the AI asks and you answer, and the problem takes shape between you.

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude. Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.

Such a fascinating talk, highly recommend. Permissions in the pre agentic era: explicitly specify what software can or can’t do Agentic era: express intent of what an agent can do and ensure it operates within the boundaries 🗺️ vs 🧭

@grinich @mastra When do we get the extended 1 hour talk about agent permissions? 🙂

The UI era is ending. 🪦 For 70 years we designed computer interfaces. Mainframe, CLI, GUI, Touch. But with AI, the interface is disappearing. What will come next? My talk from @mastra's conf this week:

After 8 years in stealth, we’re opening things up. Atom’s first open source project, Splitter, is live. More coming soon 🏗️ github.com/atoms-co/split…

Documentation has traditionally been optimised for completeness and correctness, not developer delight. Playing around with @NotebookLM made me realise how interesting you can make something as dry as application protocols feel. Would love to see @MozDevNet and other docs get an upgrade

Absolute banger of a video. The pace and music is just🤌 Felt like I was watching a Netflix doco. @newomp4 absolutely cooked with this one

I built this thing called Clicky. It's an AI teacher that lives as a buddy next to your cursor. It can see your screen, talk to you, and even point at stuff, kinda like having a real teacher next to you. I've been using it the past few days to learn Davinci Resolve, 10/10.

Atoms. atoms.co/vision

Introducing Cinematic Video Overviews, the next evolution of the NotebookLM Studio. Unlike standard templates, these are powered by a novel combination of our most advanced models to create bespoke, immersive videos from your sources. Rolling out now for Ultra users in English!

How to Become Unbeatable — a different way of learning and thinking more clearly: youtu.be/DwRu_DUI-ZE

If you’re in media, this is worth a watch. Cloudflare handles ≈20% of global traffic, so when CEO Matthew Prince warns at Cannes that AI bots are reshaping the web, publishers need to adapt or risk being left behind.

The VC world has made a misstep Introducing the world's largest founder campus

@shreyas scrum masters be like…

Middle managers in big companies

@hnshah These are awesome, thanks for sharing. I took your list and asked AI to extend it - I think you’ll like these ones.

AI can be a search engine or a thought partner. I spend 3+ hours daily shaping responses so I don’t waste time on shallow answers. The key? Knowing how to push it past surface-level thinking. Here are 21 techniques to turn AI into a second brain, not a toy.

@hnshah Absolute banger

The ability to recognize excellence in a field without firsthand experience is a superpower. If you have it, you skip the years of trial and error. You make better decisions. You move faster. You see things others don’t. Most people think you need experience to know what good looks like. They’re wrong. Excellence follows patterns. Once you learn how to spot those patterns, you can operate at a high level in any domain, even if you’ve never set foot in it. But most people never figure this out. They assume expertise is earned through time instead of insight. The best hiring managers don’t need to know how to code to recognize a world-class engineer. The best investors don’t need to be former founders to spot the next billion-dollar startup. The best taste-makers don’t need to be artists to know which designs will win. They all have something in common. They see what others miss. They break apart a field, find its hidden structure, and spot the signals that separate the best from the rest. Look at any field. The top 1% don’t just work harder. They think differently. They focus on things others ignore. They make decisions in ways that seem counterintuitive at first but are actually rooted in deep principles. This is where most people get it wrong. They assume greatness is about talent or luck. In reality, it comes down to a series of repeatable choices. If you want to recognize excellence without years of experience, your job is to find those choices. What do the best prioritize? What do they refuse to do? What do they see that everyone else is blind to? The first step is exposure. You can’t recognize world-class work if you’ve never seen it. Study the best. Not the most famous, but the people who consistently produce exceptional results. Compare good vs. great until the differences become obvious. The second step is asking the right people. Most people don’t know what makes them great. They just do it. But a few can break it down in ways that shift how you see the world. Find those people. The third step is using proxy indicators. If you don’t have firsthand experience, use external signals to guide you. Look at past performance. Pay attention to who top operators trust. Watch how the best in a field talk about their work. Patterns will emerge if you look in the right places. This isn’t about faking expertise. It’s about seeing reality more clearly than everyone else. People who can recognize excellence without direct experience move differently. They hire better. Invest better. Think better. They don’t get distracted by noise because they know what actually matters. They learn faster because they see the patterns others overlook. They make smarter decisions because they aren’t waiting for experience to show them the way. Most people go through life reacting to what’s in front of them. The ones who shape the future have a different skill. They know how to spot what’s great before anyone else does. Once you learn how to do that, everything changes.

This may be the most inspiring sentence I've ever read. Which is interesting because it's not phrased in the way things meant to be inspiring usually are.

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design an amazing user experience “How do you make something for a million people? I don’t know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Don’t stop improving it until that person loves it, and you’re not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on.” As Brian argues, designing the perfect experience for one person is a much easier place to start than trying to design something for a million people. You can figure out how to scale it later. “If you can design something really amazing using the hand-crafted part of your brain, then you can reverse-engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over. And what happens is people love your product and they tell everyone else about your product.” When people truly love your service, they become your marketing department. But counterintuitively, the biggest and best products seem to mostly get started by solving a very specific problem for a very specific user. Video source: @StanfordGSB (2023)

Give. Away. The. Gold. You think your secret sauce is so valuable. And you're right. So stop keeping it a secret. It's likely the most high-value "conversion kit" you have. Deep-niche value that can support your ICP to make their job easier??? That right there is gold. Give it away. What the heck am I talking about? Your company's expertise: • The frameworks your engineers perfected • The processes your product team developed • The methodologies your service team uses daily Turn that knowledge into: • Step-by-step playbooks for implementing your approach • Weekly newsletters breaking down industry challenges • Behind-the-scenes content showing how you solve problems • Workshop series teaching your proven methods Example? A DevOps platform sharing their deployment checklist. An HR tech company revealing their compensation frameworks. A sales enablement tool teaching qualification strategies. Old-school marketing says this is risky. But here's what happens: Your ICP starts using your expertise before they need your product. They implement your frameworks, see results, and when they hit the scaling point? Or when they realize it's too much for them to do well on their own? You're not just another vendor. You're the trusted expert who's been making their job easier for months. Or even years. This isn't giving away your competitive advantage. It's proving it.