L.D. Humphreys

I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this..... But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software. I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it. He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code. Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time. His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages. His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five." Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder. I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.

Me reviewing the code written by Claude before pushing it to production

is this what divorce feels like? 🥺

1 million context window: Now generally available for Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6.

Devs are acting like they didn’t write slop code before AI.

Maturing is realizing that Tony Stark was a vibe-coder.

With vibe coding, you accidentally learn: - how APIs connect everything. - why your .env file matters. - what localhost really means. - why deployments break but local works. - how auth actually works. - what really happens after npm install. - how backend logic flows. - how your database is structured. - why rate limits exist.

Cal AI has been acquired by MyFitnessPal 🚨 Henry and I started Cal AI as 17-year old high school students with one mission: make calorie tracking easier with AI. In just 18 months, we’ve helped millions of people lose millions of pounds. And we broke $50m in ARR along the way. We are at an incredible inflection point in history where ANYBODY can build a product that can improve lives and make millions. As founders, we get a lot of praise. The truth is that this would not have been possible without our incredible 30+ person team. We are so proud of what this team has accomplished, and are thankful to everyone that has been instrumental in Cal AI’s development and success. Cal AI will continue as a separate app from MyFitnessPal. The combined team will share resources to continue helping people achieve their fitness goals!

The first million ARR is just the founders hustling like crazy. If you are selling to startups, you can sell very fast if you solve their problem. There's no gatekeeping. They will review your product, and use it if it works. But in vertical SaaS, it's a much longer cycle. It takes a few months to just get known in your vertical where they talk to you. Then it takes 2 years for them to trust you enough to use your product. You have to gain critical mass where people have heard about you from others, so sales is not a complete waste of time. Then the flywheel starts spinning and your close rate increases. Money helps bypass some of this, but not all. In vertical SaaS, building trust takes time, and only the founders can lead the charge on that.

I know a founder who literally got into yc solo. runs 6-8 parallel claude codes with 3 max plans and has 2 startups. each at 1m in under 6 months and never raised after YC. startups are changing faster than you can possibly imagine