Matthew Berman

I spent an hour picking @mvanhorn's brain about loops, agents, and AI workflows. Here are the 5 biggest takeaways from our conversation: --- 1. A loop is just a cron job plus an LLM. We've had automation forever. A cron job runs on a schedule and follows instructions: every morning at 8 AM send the report, every night at midnight back up the database. What's new is the software can make decisions now. Instead of sending the same report every day, it picks which report matters. Instead of reviewing every pull request, it flags the ones that need a human. You no longer have to just "schedule things". You can now implement judgment directly into these tasks. --- 2. Taste matters more than coding Matt isn't a software engineer. Yet he's been shipping insanely useful products because the cost of building has collapsed. His challenge was simple: "You say you're an idea person? Prove it. You now can." For years, having an idea wasn't enough. You needed engineers to test it. Now the biggest bottleneck is just deciding what deserves to be built in the first place. The builders still win. But now the builders can be anyone. Including you ;) --- 3. Skillify everything. This was probably my favorite framework from the conversation. If you do something more than once, turn it into a skill. Notion template? Skill. Research process? Skill. Sales prep workflow? Skill. If you're doing the same thing over and over, you're usually looking at a future skill. The goal is capturing judgment so it can be reused, refined, and eventually delegated to an agent. --- 4. Agents move faster through a CLI than a webpage. Humans use interfaces because we need the visual cues. We click buttons, we scan pages, that's how our brains work. An agent doesn't need any of that. Every click is another step, every page load another chance to fail. That's why Matt built Printing Press. Instead of teaching an agent to navigate a website, you give it a command line that talks straight to the underlying API. Less friction and fewer ways for it to break. Genius, if you ask me. --- 5. Apply new ideas to your own business One workflow Matt shared stood out. He'll take a YouTube video, an article, transcripts from his sales calls, and notes from previous conversations, then have AI apply the lessons directly to his own situation. Not summarize the content. Apply it. The people who are getting the most out of AI right now are getting good at spotting their own bottlenecks and pointing these increasingly capable systems at them. --- Final thoughts The tools will keep getting better on their own. Taste won't. That part's on you, and trust me, it's worth the investment. The good news: if you're reading this, you're already ahead :) P.S. List of helpful tools Matt recommended in the comments below. Happy building!

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The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

no one asked and i delivered. here are my thoughts on the current state of tech media while i take a bubble bath and risk destroying my fully specced out macbook forever. i also read some fan mail. 00:00 - “New Media” should be “Corporate Media” 01:45 - The different types of Tech Media 04:05 - @foundersfund Mafia reaction 06:28 - @DylanAbruscato reaction 11:32 - Edge > format 15:25 - Clip driven growth 20:05 - @Theo reaction 23:00 - The audience for tech media is small 26:24 - @jasminewsun reaction and personal style > polish 28:10 - @ti_morse reaction 31:35 - MOTS fan mail 32:08 - @0xluffy reaction 33:29 - @squirtle_says reaction 35:10 - @hopes_revenge reaction 36:12 - @DeepDishEnjoyer shoutout