Benjamin Stein

I told my 75yo Mom it's pronounced "Clyde" and she's been telling her friends about it all week and I feel really really guilty but I laugh every single time.

@GergelyOrosz I think discoverability. I'm posting way more content than I ever have before - almost every decent idea I have gets written up these days - but my readership is def down. With so much increased content it's harder and harder to break through

AI - in theory - should make writing easier, thus expressing ideas should be a lot easier. And yet, I don't see all that much more things that are worthwhile to read. Sure, there's a lot more junk. But I don't see more interesting eng blogs, personal tech-related blogs etc. What is going on? (Is this a discoverability issue? Or are people / teams not writing/sharing all that much more, indeed?)

@cloudwithraj @petergyang Right??

@petergyang seriously, my kid's middle school sends more email than Big Tech

You know what would be a good AI automation: When I receive those 10 page weekly newsletters from my kid's school I want AI to tell me if there's early dismissal or anything I should pay attention to.

@noelkhw @petergyang 1000% this! Email reading and slack summaries are fine, but when the urgent ones become push... 🤯 superduperlabs.com It's so good. You can't go back.

@petergyang the real unlock is when AI doesn't wait for you to ask. it just tells you what you need to know before you think to check. we're so used to pulling information. push is the next frontier.

RIP Jeeves. Miss you brother. mashable.com/article/ask-je…

iPhone Mommies! iPad Daddies! SuperDuper is live in the App Store. Stop reading school newsletters and missing practice schedules and forgetting permission slips. superduperlabs.com/ios

@hthieblot An app for parents to manage their family's logistics

Describe your product in exactly one sentence. No buzzwords, no fluff, just the core value. If I can’t understand your business in ten seconds, I’m not investing. Hit me & i'll be in your DMs

1500 words don't come close to describing how magical using Posthog as a headless analytics platform actually is. I've spent 30 years failing to use analytics products. From CQcounter to Uchin to GA to Amplitude to Statsig. Posthog's agent and MCP is the first one that actually solves my problems. They don't make me learn all their jargon and chats and dashboards. They just solve my problem. I'll be honest - it was a huge mental leap to not even _try_ to use their web interface. But wow. It may be the first (only?) existing product I've used that has incorporated AI + agents in a way that changes everything. @james406 and team have shown us the future. Not hyperboli.

@clairevo I feel so seen

Btw that 20% is the dining room table and the parents’ bathroom (does not matter how many bathrooms there are.)

What’s so funny to me about this whole idea that you need a big house to have kids thing is these people don’t realize the family spends 99% of awake time in 20% of the house.

@GergelyOrosz @hirschibar To be clear, I will 100% give into pressure and abuse this for product marketing by the end of the year and erase all my trust and good will. But for now, it's dope

@GergelyOrosz @hirschibar While I agree 99.9%, when we implemented notifications in our parenting app, it changed everything. The app went from "oh this is a cool dashboard" to "how did we function before this??" Push was the biggest unlock.

And killed notifications from Spotify as well. Cannot believe how there is practically no company by now that has not abused push notifications for product marketing. I’ve now been trained to disallow notifications from any and all apps - save for my main banking+messaging one

@_CallMeMacy Also, people email crazy shit. Like calendar invites that look like this benjaminste.in/blog/2026/04/1…

@_CallMeMacy We built MVP of SuperDuper (AI for family logistics from Gmail & GCal) over winter break. Fast fwd and our backlog is longer than ever! The underlying data model & deep personal understanding is what took it from "this is neat" to "this is *indespensible*" IMHO of course

Lately, I've been advising founders to vibecode their own CRM that reads their emails, calendars, and keeps things up to date in real time. It took me 2 hours to create my own using Claude Code (and I've never coded in my life). Am I crazy for suggesting this or do others agree?

@MerriamWebster restaurant & license

What word is your spelling nemesis? This is a safe space.

[Sunday Morning Hanging with Nerds] Try this in Claude Code "Look in /var/log at my system logs and make suggestions on how to improve my Mac's performance. (Note: there's obviously a LOT Of data in there, so use good judgment to get enough signal without processing everything (e.g. awk, head, tail, don't unarchive old logs, etc)" Wait 2 minutes. It found unused versions of MySQL crashing in a loop, SOC2 monitoring agents from past jobs still active, out of date software, a network issues, and more. And instructions to remediate each one! Really neat, right? Totally breathes new life into your crufty laptop that's been gathering detritis for years. What's cool is that this isn't a human tractable problem but it's basically a unit test for Opus. Let me know what you find and if it fixes your [ running out of memory | slow wifi | fan won't stop | battery dies fast ] problems. (Disclaimer: don't blindly run sudo commands that an LLM tells you. I mean, I do, but you shouldn't. Or at least you shouldn't blame me.)

@Shpigford Plex media servers, natch

so what are we doing with our 🦞 mac minis now?

Pixel Mommies! Samsung Daddies! The wait is over -- SuperDuper is live in the Google Play Store: superduperlabs.com/android

@mikesabat You should aspire to be in that list one day

@benstein Keep it coming. Love the family edge cases.

One fun part of building for families is we name all our edge cases after famous families - real and imaginary - and everyone on the team instantly knows what we're talking about. The Don Draper problem is when someone has an entire 2nd family and breaks our data model. The George Foreman problem is how to get AI to disambiguate kids with the same name. The Taylor Swift problem is how to handly ambiguously gendered names. And the Weasley problem is to make the UX responsive when you have 7 kids. It's by far my favorite corporate jargon. And actually super useful shorthand!