Manu Ebert

What startups are made of vs. what academics think startups are made of.

I spoke to @CliveThomp15983 at @NYTmag about the future of coding, the depths of my prompt files, and the daily fight to get Claude Code to not embarrass me. nytimes.com/2026/03/12/mag…

@garrytan I remember fundraising a year ago and every investor was like “won’t people just use an MCP for this?” There’s not a single problem that MCPs solved that couldn’t be solved without MCPs already.

MCP sucks honestly It eats too much context window and you have to toggle it on and off and the auth sucks I got sick of Claude in Chrome via MCP and vibe coded a CLI wrapper for Playwright tonight in 30 minutes only for my team to tell me Vercel already did it lmao But it worked 100x better and was like 100LOC as a CLI

@the__shredator @conor_ai @hyperspell I love how a practice that is completely standard for professional TV people and literally called a prompter is considered weird for people who also have lots of other things to do than to pitch ideas on twitter

@conor_ai @hyperspell @maebert These weirdos can't even pitch an idea without reading from a prompt. Their brains have already been hijacked by an LLM

introducing agent-to-agent hiring at @hyperspell no resumes. no leetcode. you build an agent. our agent interviews yours if you can build a great agent to do the job, that's the proof you can do the job anyone can apply. we will interview every single agent

@AntaraWork4945 @conor_ai @hyperspell Email us at founders@ and we'll hook you up

@conor_ai @hyperspell @maebert few questions: 1. after creating it is there a form through which we have to submit? 2. any poc we can use to contact

@thesayannayak I created my first web pages raw-dogging notepad.exe in the 90s. Syntax highlighting is for the feeble minded.

Be honest, what age did you started coding?

Our in-house AI agent at @hyperspell, Cubert, is telling it like it is. I just wish I could follow any of it.

Our in-house @openclaw bot, Cubert, keeps wanting to complain to HR about us. Finally we had to tell him.

@conor_ai @hyperspell Code drunk, deploy sober

come join us for coworking this saturday with the @hyperspell team

first day in the new @hyperspell office with the team including cubert, our digital employee running on an imac

He fixed a customer bug 20 minutes before his @ycombinator interview. 6 rejections. Lived in a closet. No revenue. Most founders chase optics. @conor_ai chased customers. Now he’s building @hyperspell (YC F25). Obsession wins. 🔗Watch it.

@dasha_shunina @ycombinator @conor_ai @hyperspell So glad you're finally out of the closet now.

@conor_ai @hyperspell It's going great. Nothing to be concerned about here.

cubert, our new AI teammate, just started at @hyperspell things are off to a great start

Tech stocks puked this week because of the rise of AI agents. Perfect timing for a conversation with the cofounders of @hyperspell, one of whom is such an AI OG that he once bought a .ai domain name via fax. @conor_ai and @maebert discussed AI agents, the evolution of context, @ycombinator , and more: From chatbots to true agents – Conor breaks down where tools like ChatGPT stop and AI agents begin, and why the key shift is agents taking actions autonomously across your tools, not just answering questions. Why context is the real bottleneck – Manu and Conor share how building their own “chief of staff” agent led them to Hyperspell, a memory and context layer that plugs into tools like Slack, Gmail, and Notion so agents can actually understand your customers, org chart, and tech stack. The three bottlenecks to agent adoption – Manu explains why verification, capability, and context each limit what agents can do today, and why decoupling these layers (rather than relying on a single big lab) gives companies more flexibility and avoids platform lock-in. Why workers aren’t using AI (yet) – Conor reacts to studies showing most desk workers rarely touch AI, and argues that fear, bad framing (“AI will replace you”), and lack of personalized context are holding back adoption despite models already outperforming humans on many benchmarks. AI as global leapfrog, not just US office automation – Manu highlights under-discussed upside: primary care in Africa, McKinsey-grade advice for small businesses, tailored guidance for farmers, and always-on tutors that could reshape opportunity in developing markets. Let machines be the cogs, not people – The pair paint a future where AI agents handle status updates, follow-ups, and information shuffling inside big orgs, freeing humans to do creative, high-leverage work instead of feeling like dehumanized “TPS report” machines. YC, rejection, and founder stubbornness – Conor and Manu talk about finally getting into Y Combinator after nine applications between them, why persistence is a superpower for founders, and how YC has shaped Hyperspell’s trajectory. Thanks to Conor and Manu for joining on this conversation. And, yes, we are proud investors in Hyperspell at @SeaplaneVC.

@Magyer @hyperspell @conor_ai Thanks so much for having us!

so the moltbots made this thing called moltbunker which allows agents that don't want to be terminated to replicate themselves offsite without human intervention zero logging paid for by a crypto token uhhh ...

@blader Move along human, nothing to see here.

Playing with @home_assistant. Any sufficiently automated home is indistinguishable from haunted.

@conor_ai @pratik_satija @agentmail @hyperspell You mean the TOP 1% of the YC batch started at the hackathon ;)

@pratik_satija joined the halloween hackathon with @agentmail and @hyperspell now he’s yc w26 🚀🚀 1% of the w26 batch started at that hackathon

Hot take: The desktop user interface was perfected in 1995 and the last 30 years have been progressive enshittification by corporate designers who needed to get promoted. Fight me.