Daniel O'Shea

I started a new company. We're working on one of the big, practical problems in AI right now: how teams of humans and agents work together on important, complicated, messy projects. AI is a powerful tool, but people still need to set strategy, bring creativity, provide feedback, and do things the models can't handle yet. And to get anything meaningful done today, you're jumping between a dozen tools with context scattered across countless chat sessions owned by different people on your team. There's no good way to plan, track, and manage all of this across both humans and AI. Our solution is a new kind of project management tool with an AI project manager that relentlessly moves work forward. It can run growth, product, and ops projects end-to-end, using AI where it works well and people where judgment and creativity matter. Early customers are using it for content marketing, video production, web development, recruiting, and event planning. Plenty more use cases I'm excited to share. Interested in trying it? Hit me up. Looking for a few more design partners.

Some personal news! Recently, I stepped back from the day-to-day at @Instacart to focus on investing full-time. I sat down with my friend @jaltma on Uncapped to talk about building Instacart and my philosophy on early-stage investing — check it out here!

@callmeed you are still typing??

I just burned my hand really bad in the kitchen How am I going to write code tomorrow if I can’t even type prompts into cursor?

is there a limit to the number of tabs a google doc can have? asking for a friend.

@s_ssignum most of them have to be

@oshea Are they AI generated?

Its wild that there are already 30+ vibe coding books on amazon when we are just barely starting to figure out what works

I'm going to do deep dives into these capabilities in my newsletter: operationalai.substack.com Subscribe if you want to see evals based on real world use cases, model/tool reviews, and practical advice on how to deploy AI.

When talking to people that don’t really understand AI, I find it helpful to frame it as a set of 10 new software capabilities that didn’t exist a few years ago: - Natural-Language Understanding - the ability to deeply understand written content - Reasoning - the ability to connect facts and context to draw sound conclusions - Planning - the ability to break a big goal into clear, ordered steps - Instruction Following - the ability to stick to detailed, multi-step directions without drifting - Writing & Summarization - the ability to expand notes into polished prose or shrink long text into briefs - Tool Use - the ability to decide when an external APIs is needed to complete a task and call it - Browser & Desktop Automation - the ability to click through unstructured GUIs and web pages when no API exists - Code Generation - the ability to produce clean, runnable code and queries on demand - Image & Video Understanding - the ability to interpret pictures and footage for objects, text, and anomalies - Voice Synthesis & Recognition - the ability to listen, transcribe, and speak in real time with natural cadence It's not a human-like entity that's gonna take our jobs. It's just a piece of technology that can unlock new experiences, products, and automations that weren't possible until recently.

@callmeed Couldn’t agree more

said it before and I’ll say it again: ai generated ugc is going to be bad for everyone in the long run: - bad for consumers because they’re being lied to (basically a fake review) - bad for ecomm retailers because no one will trust real ugc - bad for social networks because it increases slop & noise short-lived alpha

If OpenAI buys Windsurf and then forces us to use only their models I will be sad.

Just tried to join my first Zoom meeting in awhile and of course their website is completely down lol I hate to become more reliant on Google products, but Meet is way better. Let's all just use that for now.

Beautiful day in Austin to touch some grass…and trees…and wood chips

the vast majority of people still have no idea how powerful the current models are

Figuring out 1-of-1 printing for AI generated storybooks has been a pain. All the providers we looked at were either very expensive or had quality issues. We finally have a solution I'm excited about and the first few books are printing soon!!

If you are looking to hire a team of experienced AI Engineers to work on product features, automation, or agents, DM me. More info coming soon.

I'm partnering with some technical founders from the first batch of TimeToBuild to start an applied AI agency. I’m really excited about this for 2 reasons: 1. Helping companies deploy AI is a massive opportunity. Most companies aren’t close to fully utilizing the technology that is available today. 2. I can help more engineers leave their 9-5s to do AI research, explore their own ideas, and start companies. This is the core mission of TimeToBuild.

@adrianpcarbone ya same, many people travel this road and always end up at the same place

@oshea While painful, I feel like I needed to try all the things before understanding this reality

I used to think the right productivity app would solve everything. Notion. Todoist. Apple Notes. Roam. Tana. I tried them all—convinced the perfect setup would magically give me more time back in my day. Spoiler: it didn’t. Instead, I spent more time organizing than actually working. Tweaking systems instead of tackling the real work. At some point, I realized the truth: There is no perfect system. And chasing one only pulls you further away from what matters.

tailorbooks.com If you want to make your own.

This is book 1 in a series I'm making for my 5yo who is learning to read Spanish. He is the main character along with our dog and I am incorporating a bunch of things he's interested in. I expect him to fly through this when the hard copy arrives.