More Donut than Man 🍩

I'm so sorry to learn that you have no idea what you are talking about but also happy to know the Internet gives you a voice.

#NewProfilePic to celebrate the release of @WalkingDead_AMC Mini Museum Prop Collection So many cool things to share!! kickstarter.com/projects/minim…

@bcherny How about this: I ended up on Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week talking about the software solutions we’ve created in my rural West Virginia warehouse. Innovation can happen anywhere! 😎 initiativedistribution.com/blog/bloomberg…

It's been an amazing start to Code w/ Claude! Love hearing what people are building with Claude Code and getting feedback on what we can do better.

@bonniegrrl @nlyonne ❤️❤️❤️ You’re not invisible

@nlyonne Me right now thanks to X algorithm that basically hides all my tweets. 😂

How’s everyone doing on this app?

@FreshCleanThrds Ordered a new shirt via @Amazon and it arrived pre-stained 😅 Actually wet. Bag was sticky AF. Smell? Not so great. It’s going back naturally but wow they’re not treating your merch well.

@ShopifyEng That’s cool. How about implementing network edge filtering to block AI agents from polluting merchants data streams? This is killing our conversion and ruining marketing campaigns for literally everyone.

We reverse-engineered training data from thousands of merchant-created automations and fine-tuned Qwen3-32B into a tool-calling agent for Shopify Flow. Results: 2.2x faster, 68% cheaper The more interesting part: why we trained on Python instead of our own DSL, and what broke when benchmarks looked good but production didn't. ⬇️

Really can’t understand why @Shopify refuses to do anything about this let alone acknowledge the issue. Just standard replies that are now light years out of date. This is only going to get worse.

Not even half of this is flagged as bot traffic and yet 100% of this is bot driven. Probably AI agents wilding across the entire #shopify infrastructure, creating mass havoc for merchants,

Over 50,000 bot sessions from Singapore hitting our @Shopify site in 14 days. Can you imagine what that does to our stats and how it poisons our marketing data? Blocky isn’t going to fix this @tobi. We need edge filtering asap. cc @ShopifyEng

As a tech dude, I think pretext is super cool. But as a writer, I’d just like people to read more and I’m not sure this is going to make that problem any better.

@mindthegamepod Hola do you guys publish a wine list? I gotta ask because you pop that cork every episode and I’m like 🍷🤔 @KingJames @SteveNash

@omooretweets I think your nuanced reply has a lot of merit for transactional acquisition but advertising has always been a key component of discovery for consumer brands… including the biggest consumer brands of all time. Without it, they simply do not exist.

Wow, lots of discourse on this one! A few things I want to point out from the original post: 1. I am talking about generational consumer companies. In my mind these are $10 B - $20 B+ outcomes. There are many other AMAZING consumer businesses that have gotten big with paid ads. 2. I’m not saying all growth has to be 100% organic. I’m referring specifically to paid ads which I’ve seen to be nearly always inflationary over time (cost increases at scale). This doesn’t include creator marketing, brand marketing, referral programs, etc. 3. Historically the biggest consumer outcomes are network effects businesses (social apps and marketplaces). In these cases, unless the network is growing itself pretty organically, usually the product value proposition is not strong enough. 4. Note that I say it’s a problem to grow “largely” with paid ads. I have seen companies use ads to kickstart a flywheel that then grows more organically. But if you’re 50%+ paid ads for a significant period of time starting in the early days, I think it’s tougher. This is why a lot of the consumer subscription businesses (physical and digital) that are ad-dependent have grown to be $1 B+ businesses but aren’t the biggest consumer businesses in the world. This could change with AI as the true mainstream user is willing to directly pay for software! And, lots of counter examples that people have pointed out - in my mind TikTok is probably the biggest one. That uniquely required a large content graph to start hooking users.

@toddsaunders Here’s another take on that article initiativedistribution.com/blog/claude-co…

@toddsaunders I have some actual programming expertise but I did the same thing in our West Virginia warehouse. In our case we automated batching but now we have inventory management systems and more coming out of Claude Code. initiativedistribution.com/case-studies/s…

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.

@dieworkwear Looks like he’s having some trouble filling those big shoes in more ways than one.

hmm

@CloudflareDev Thanks, [redacted] jerks. As if content and e-commerce companies aren’t dealing with enough bad actors. Now you make it easy AF and hide behind “terms and conditions”. I wonder how Meta and Shopify will feel about this? @tobi @finkd

Introducing the new /crawl endpoint - one API call and an entire site crawled. No scripts. No browser management. Just the content in HTML, Markdown, or JSON.

Science fiction rules that are highly relevant today. 1. Don’t make dinosaurs. 2. Don’t tell aliens where we live. 3. Don’t give robots guns.

@NewsHour @GeoffRBennett Rick is amazing. This is a huge win for American business.

One of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that overturned many of President Trump's global tariffs is Rick Woldenberg. He's the owner of the Chicago-based small toy manufacturer, Learning Resources. @GeoffRBennett speaks to Woldenberg about the ruling and what comes next for his business.

So excited for Rick Woldenberg and Learning Resources. This is a big win for American manufacturers.

.@tobi Any progress on providing edge level bot/country blocking for Shopify Plus accounts? Bots have gotten a lot smarter of late, using VPNs to bypass even localization filters. Apps are useless too since Shopify only provides access post render.