Michael Ducker

Missed joining this morning.? We meet again next Thursday, 8 to 930.

We had 120 RSVPs for AgentBuildersBreakfast.com this morning! An absolutely huge crowd showed up. It was so much fun. Machine Payments Protocol was the topic of the day.

what a time to be alive in tech - entirely new Trillion dollar ecosystems are being created and iterated in public every single week. (hello @x402 @tempo @stripe MPP!)

i'm seeing this pattern more and more -> prompt to install

@cramforce Y’all are cookin

▲ ~/ npx plugins add vercel/vercel-plugin

@TurnerNovak only 50g?

BREAKING: a16z is now including 50g of PROTEIN in each term sheet

sure why not

no amount of AI can solve the challenge that distilling your product marketing and story into 10 hero words is extremely tough and constantly worth iterating/testing

soc 2 has never been great but it seems to have fully crossed the scam chasm ever since vanta showed how to productize it.

.@jbahrdestefano is crushing it at @btv_vc youtube.com/watch?v=cbfcV3…

@sdamico Magic. Congratulations! I can’t wait for a low dose daily oral retratrutide.

@miradu 1) paying for equinox (and not going) 2) retatrutide 3) finasteride 4) (oral) minoxidil + taladafil (this is what actually fixed my BP as weight loss only got me to like 125/85) 5) microneedling for 6 months on the hairline 6) some vitamins off and on?

consulted zero doctors but managed to get: - blood pressure down from 140/96 to 112/77 - weight down 45lbs - alcohol consumption cut in ~half (without changing how often I go out to bars) - hairline partially grown back - side effects include fixed liver enzymes & raised T

@imdennisjiang glad you came Dennis! I loved the founder insights you brought to the group

Had a great time at the Agent Builder's Breakfast yesterday. If you're interested, it happens every Thursday in SOMA! More here: agentbuildersbreakfast.com Thanks for hosting @miradu!

Feifan makes the case for what we’re building at valet.dev - the ability to deploy your agent skills as standalone always on cloud apps.

@sm what's amazing is airlines will actually sell you this via a stop

@miradu I dare you to do it

These programattic ads are getting really good

I think we have lost some sense of judgment and moderation when it comes to product building currently. The moment you turn something into a universally celebrated metric, whether that is token burn, prototype count, or percentage of agent-written code, you start losing sight of what actually matters. I have felt the same way for a long time about overusing data and A/B testing to build products. The moment you reduce product quality or productivity to a metric, you stop shipping value and start shipping numbers. A lot of what people are doing with AI makes directional sense. The missing piece is counterbalance: 1. AI should help engineers build better products. Leaderboards and adoption metrics can be useful as directional signals. They do not tell you what is being built, whether it is good, or whether it should exist at all. 2. Users do not care what percentage of your code was written by agents. They care about the outcome. Faster output is useful. Like usually, faster doesn't seem to add to quality, clarity, or stability of products. Power to build should not become an excuse to lower quality bars. 3. LLM-generated prototypes can feel like late-night whiteboarding sessions. They look exciting in the moment and feel productive very quickly. Then a few days later you realize the idea was shallow, distracting, or simply wrong. The same trap shows up in jumping straight to code and solutions more broadly. You may just be building the wrong thing more efficiently. Prototyping has its place. So do clear thinking, good design, and a real understanding of the user’s problem. In terms of activities or momentum, the main quest and the side quest can both feel productive but only one actually moves the mission forward. 4. Adding more to products is still dangerous as ever even if time or effort to add it has gone down. Every addition creates complexity, maintenance cost, and user confusion. New features should be pushed back unless they clearly show it should exist and how it improves the product. 5. Not everything needs to be an agent shaped. A simple scheduled task does not need a full LLM sandbox. Making something agentic because it feels current or impressive does not make it right-sized, correct, or effective. The core ideas are: - even if you can, maybe you should not. - more power we have to build should not reduce our need to think, it should increase it.

@sytaylor i find it puzzling. screams apple newton energy

The thirst for mindshare in agentic commerce and payments is UNHINGED rn. Everyone knows it will go parabolic. Nobody knows when. Such a weird dynamic.

are we asking our AI to post on websites to then screenshot as social proof now? or is it that the ai agent's opinion is the social proof? this is a rabbit hole to untangle

so claude code is down - is today the day i try codex cli?

@CreadsApp case in point ^

@miradu Programmatic ads can be surprisingly effective when the targeting is on point. It’s all about precision.