GM! It’s Brett. One of the most brilliant AI researchers, Andrej Karpathy, says something simple but uncomfortable: you don’t need to be smart to win - you need agency.
That was always true. AI just removed the last excuse.
The people who compound aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones who do what they say they’ll do.
If you set one goal this year, make it this: increase your say-to-do ratio.
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👀 My predictions for 2026 (that actually matter to you)
There will be both major unemployment and difficulty hiring - AI will make it even easier to both nail interviews (without knowing anything) but also not have to make hires.
The first $1B company under 10 employees will emerge - it will run on thousands of agents across engineering, marketing, and more.
Non-technical becomes synonymous with lazy - as AI coding tools get more powerful, people who don't take advantage of them will be looked down upon.
Google and Anthropic pull ahead in AI research - especially for coding agents, these two companies will take lead over Open AI and others.
ChatGPT app store becomes a major startup opportunity - the first companies built entirely on ChatGPT will emerge.
The party (bubble) keeps going - massive IPOs and acquisitions with major advances in AI keep the money pouring into the industry.
The startup industry 10x's - AI coding tools will unlock millions more to start companies and existing technical founders to 10x their output
AI content goes mainstream & faces backlash - AI songs will hit top 10, AI influencers hit millions of followers, but the public pushes back and seeks organic human-made content
AGI panic ensues - major advancements from the research labs that demonstrate intelligence (even conscious experience and agency) will drive some people to panic and doomsday prep.
Humanoid robots roll out in major tech hubs - robots will be seen in daily life for the first time in cities like San Francisco
💻 How Dan Shipper uses AI to build "artisanal" apps
Dan Shipper runs Every, a company that sits at the intersection of media, software, and AI experimentation.
Every publishes one of the most thoughtful newsletters on AI and also builds a growing suite of AI-native tools - Monologue, Spiral, Sparkle, and Cora - used by thousands of paying customers.
What’s different is how those tools get built.
Dan doesn’t start with market research decks or feature gap analyses. Every product begins with a personal itch. Someone on the team wants a tool badly enough that they build it for themselves - often in a weekend. The team uses it internally first. If it spreads inside the company, that’s the signal. Only then does it go out to the audience.
AI makes this process viable. You can go from “I want this” to a working product in hours, not months. That speed allows taste - not strategy decks - to drive decisions.
They also resist premature differentiation. Instead of guessing what makes a product unique, they ship, observe who loves it, and reverse-engineer why.
Monologue, for example, resonated most with people switching languages or mental contexts all day - a reflection of its creator’s own life.
To support this, Every even built internal AI workflows - shared Claude projects, editorial prompts, and agent-like interviewers - to refine ideas and quality at scale.
🧠 ON MY MIND
10 ideas for greater clarity in 2026 (Shreyas Doshi)
Neuralink to start high-volume production of brain-computer interface devices
Authority Is the AI Bottleneck (Jamin Ball)
Google will now give you option to change your @gmail.com address
SimilarWeb data shows AI web traffic shifting in 2025: ChatGPT’s share fell from 87% to 68%, while Google’s Gemini tripled to 18% in the past year
👀 FROM THE FEED
❓ AI GENERATED OR NO
Last week’s poll: If you guessed AI-generated… you were right.
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ Yeah (~71%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nope (~29%)
Here’s the original.
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