Mike Ritchie
2.8K posts

Mike Ritchie
@thisritchie
Founder @definiteapp (a data team that never sleeps)

Thank god MCP is dead Just as useless of an idea as LLMs.txt was It's all dumb abstractions that AI doesn't need because AI's are as smart as humans so they can just use what was already there which is APIs


Thank god MCP is dead Just as useless of an idea as LLMs.txt was It's all dumb abstractions that AI doesn't need because AI's are as smart as humans so they can just use what was already there which is APIs






When you send money abroad, it should just arrive, without a massive haircut.





In the next version of Claude Code.. We're introducing two new Skills: /simplify and /batch. I have been using both daily, and am excited to share them with everyone. Combined, these kills automate much of the work it used to take to (1) shepherd a pull request to production and (2) perform straightforward, parallelizable code migrations.




A friend at a nine-person startup just asked me what tools he needs to build out his GTM stack. He rattled off RB2B, Clay, Apollo, Instantly, HeyReach, Nooks. My answer was basically: slow down. If you're a nine-person company, you need a CRM. That's your foundation. Everything else is optional until you've proven your sales motion actually works. I recommend Salesforce. I've built Salesforce orgs from scratch and HubSpot orgs from scratch, and I have a strong preference. DM me or argue in the comments. You can hook up the Salesforce CLI to Claude Code and brain dump about how you want your CRM to work. Deal stages, fields, object relationships. It builds it. You can upload CSVs, have Leadmagic enrich them, and push data back into Salesforce through the CLI and Apex code. Plain English in, production-grade CRM infrastructure out. You can't do that with HubSpot. They don't have that programmatic layer. People complain about Salesforce being clunky, but in the AI era, that underlying architecture is actually an advantage. The complexity that made it annoying to configure manually makes it incredibly powerful when you can just talk to it. Sorry Hubspot fanbois ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Stack for a small team: Salesforce, Leadmagic, Claude Code. That gets you surprisingly far. You could use just that to get to 1m ARR tbh RB2B and website de-anonymization tools are only useful if you already have meaningful traffic. Even then, you need to layer multiple providers, same as an email waterfall. The problem is most of these providers license data from the same handful of upstream sources. You're paying five vendors to validate the same email from the same dataset. It's basically a Ponzi scheme for email data providers. I'm being hyperbolic, but if you don't understand how these systems work under the hood, you're subsidizing everyone who does. LinkedIn automation: I use Lemlist. The specific tool doesn't matter. What matters is you cannot treat LinkedIn like an email campaign. LinkedIn monitors everything. I send maybe 5-6 highly relevant messages a day, only to people I'm fairly confident will respond. Your LinkedIn profile is one of the most valuable things you own professionally. Don't blow it up trying to scale before you know what works. On dialers: don't. If you're a ten-person company, have people dial off their cell phones. Why does a founding AE need recorded calls? Who's reviewing them? Tools like Nooks and Gong exist so managers can verify reps are actually working. They're built for the professional managerial class, not for the person actually selling. Don't go buy Nooks and all this other shit. Most of us would be better off with a notepad, a pen, and a cell phone. Get your CRM right. Hook it up to Claude Code. Add a basic enrichment layer. Go talk to people. Don't make sales rocket surgery before you even close any deals. That's just MBA level procrastination.





You can literally become luckier just by deciding that you are a lucky person who experiences lucky things


unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water @openclaw has shown me that api & cli will win. every MCP server you connect loads its tool definitions into your context window. name, description, parameter schema, all of it. connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. context bloat will never be a good thing - performance-wise or economically. i assume this is why @steipete left it out of @openclaw. the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need. it can run any command invented since the beginning of computers. a resurgence of glory for ancient, but powerful tools like curl, sed, awk, grep. command line tools once mastered by the greats, but long forgotten and buried underneath abstractions developed for us lesser mortals. now available to us all, piloted by the smartest models on earth. every founder gets their own mass army of greybeards. the inertia required for MCP adoption, imo, is too great to overcome the momentum @openclaw has breathed into api + cli + skills. the common defenses people bring up: • "MCP gives you typed schemas and validation" — so does a well-documented CLI • "MCP gives you explicit permissions" — so does a sandbox with an allowlist • "MCP is a standard" — a standard that scales poorly is still a standard that scales poorly lastly, i've heard many MCP servers are just wrapping existing APIs - that kind of redundancy and unnecessary indirection should be a red flag. so, let's drop it and redirect our efforts into cli tools & apis with accompanying skills.








