Brett Hellman

Seeing a pattern lately. Employee uses Matter. Changes jobs. Gets the new company on @SlackHQ so they can use @MatterApp. And recognition and rewards blossom.

Maybe it named itself 😱

Whoever named Gemini at Google really named it. In the mythology, the immortal twin gives up his immortality to save the life of his mortal twin. It’s just like Google giving up 100% of its free cash flow to make sure Deepmind survives.

It also raises a hard truth that the people making these decisions are not always the ones best positioned to shape the future.

Layoffs at scale are meant to strengthen companies, yet they rarely produce the outcomes leaders hope for. For many, the moment becomes an inflection point toward founding, building, and leading something much bigger.

I was chatting with a group of Princeton CS students and they told me the CS enrollment has been way down. I looked into it, and it's definitely a trend: - Nationally, 62% of CS programs reported declines in 2025 - Down 9% over past 2 years across UC schools - Most striking, existing CS majors are feeling the most regret about their choice of major with the rise of AI (more than Humanities majors 😬) Whether we'll need more or fewer engineers in the future, the supply of new ones is shrinking. Maybe a temporary blip, maybe a sign of things to come. The silver lining though is that if there's a surge of demand for engineers, existing engineers will become super valuable.

Before you decide to be a manager, you should think hard about whether it's the right path for you. Because you don't have to do it. Especially if you don't really want to, but believe the management ladder is the only way to move up in your career. A lot of people shouldn't be forced into management – if you're really not a people person, or you only want to focus on the work, or you thrive on having regular day to-day successes and accomplishments and the murky maybe-your-team-will-succeed-one-day-style of management is less motivating to you. - #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

@sean_lynch surprised?

without comment

@pitdesi @jmj great card but really low limits

best card for most is RH gold, get 3% cash back I am an incorrigible credit card optimizer. I enjoy juggling multiple cards and knowing which card to use out for which purchase. But it’s like a game that I enjoy that maybe saves me a few thousand bucks a year- not worth the mental bandwidth for most.

Good Chase offer right now for CSR Free Whoop for a year Still not sure I want it tbh

Your customers will teach you how to go from $1m to $100m ARR, you just have to listen True especially if your initial TAM seems quite small

.@sama Feature request: If there’s an image in my clipboard when ChatGPT opens, auto start the upload. Tiny change. Huge time saver for power users.

@sama well said

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.) Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.

Anthropic just took a big swipe at OpenAI's decision to put ads in ChatGPT. Anthropic is airing ads mocking ChatGPT ads during the Super Bowl, and they're hilarious 😅 Anthropic is also committing to no ads in Claude theverge.com/ai-artificial-…

.@molekuleair still no update from support. help please?

@bdistel Sooner you embrace it the better off you’ll be!

We've reached a serious milestone at Windmill. I can no longer function efficiently without installing MSFT products. This goes against everything I believe in.

@nikunj @lmramirez_ @hall time for a reunion

@lmramirez_ @hall h/t @bretthellman 🙏

If I had to make a Venn diagram of a) extremely kind b) brilliant engineer and c) phenomenal design taste, there would only be ONE person inside it.. and that’s Luis. I’m so glad to have met him at @hall (RIP) 12 years ago and thrilled to call him a close friend now 🫡

Would no longer recommend @molekuleair - their support does not support. Devices break.

.@molekuleair my Air Purifier been broken since December. Support is not helping. Taking days between unhelpful email replies. Please help.

Gemini is very, very good

Hire out of pain. Don't hire because you think you'll need someone soon or maybe sometime later. Wait until you or your team are actually hurting: working weekends, missing family dinners, dropping balls. That pain is the signal that the role is real. I learned this the hard way after watching founders (including myself) hire ahead of need and end up with people in roles that weren't fully formed yet. When you hire out of pain, you know exactly what the job is because you've been doing it yourself. You can evaluate performance because you know what good looks like. And the new hire knows you'll step back in if they fail, because you were just doing it last week.