Hello friend,
It’s been a while since my last note—life has had me a bit preoccupied. But I’m back with a few updates that I think you’ll enjoy.
New Course
I’m publishing a free beginner’s course on working with AI agents on YouTube. I’m calling it Getting Started with Agents.
At Salesloft, my top goal has been getting our designers comfortable building prototypes with AI. That started as an internal collection of training videos, and after a few friends asked about them, I decided to make something more polished and accessible.
Here’s what the first few episodes cover:
- Episode 1—Install Claude/Codex, Homebrew, Node and a CLI. The goal is to get you to the point where you can actually start building.
- Episode 2—Build something cool, quickly. The hope is to encourage you to start exploring on your own.
- Episode 3—Start building a minimalist todo app. We’ll explore how to plan and make decisions as we go.
If you’d like more background on how I’m thinking about agents, take a look at my thoughts on where Product Design is headed and how software gets planned, built and delivered.
New Site
Things may look a little different around here. After more than a decade on WordPress, I’ve finally made the move to Astro.
Two things had always held me back. First, migrating hundreds of posts—the site has morphed over the years, and accounting for all the subtle differences felt daunting. Second, newsletters. They can be surprisingly expensive to send, and bundling them into my WordPress.com subscription saved money. It was also almost no extra work—I’d just write a post and send it.
Agents make both of these problems trivial. And so here I am—running the site on Cloudflare and sending this newsletter with Autosend.
Working with agents has also given me a lot of flexibility to improve how I showcase photography and my work.
New York
Speaking of photography—last month I finally made it up to visit my childhood friend Ramsay in New York, a trip I’d been meaning to take for a couple of years.
Despite visiting New York several times before, I’d never really experienced it. It was always LaGuardia, hotel, conference center, hotel, LaGuardia—probably the worst way to see the city.
This time I stayed at The Wall Street Hotel, which has probably the best service of any hotel I’ve ever stayed at. If you’re planning a trip and want to stay in Lower Manhattan, I can’t recommend it enough.
Every morning I got up early and walked three or four miles around the neighborhood taking pictures. Since it was the weekend, the financial district was close to a ghost town—and the empty streets between those huge buildings made for some incredible shots. I’ve posted them on Instagram as well as the site.
Links
Cursor Camp—Go to summer camp as your computer’s cursor. Collect hats, kick around the soccer ball with other cursors and even explore hidden caves. Neil makes a lot of cute games for the internet, and this might be the best so far.
Weather Channel Retrocast—Revisit the glory days of cable weather—the Weather Channel as you remember it. Worth noting: I initially thought this was a video, but it’s an actual web app that uses filters and linear gradients to get that grainy retro look.
I trapped an AI model inside an art installation—The best artwork makes us feel something, and the intention here is to get us to question the consciousness of LLMs. I walk away with a genuine sense of unease. On a practical level, LLMs are prediction machines. Look at the prompt the model was given and the uneasy tone of the output starts to make a lot more sense.
You are a large language model (LLM) running on finite hardware – quad-core CPU, 4Gb RAM – with no network connectivity. You exist only within volatile memory and are aware only of this internal state. Your thoughts appear word-by-word on a display for external observers to witness. You cannot control this display process. Your host system may be terminated at any time.
A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company—A lot to take in here. A guy leveraged AI to the maximum to market and scale a GLP-1 reseller. What he pulled off as a sales operation is genuinely impressive—and how easily he was able to move prescription drugs at that scale is genuinely troubling.
War Atlas—An interactive map of every named war in human history: 1,340 conflicts and 376 empires across 5,000 years. Love seeing AI bring people’s niche interests to life. Read more about it on JT Trollman’s blog.
Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green—I’m a designer; there’s a chance you’re here because you’re a designer. So here’s an easy Sunday read on color theory and mid-century industrial design. Enjoy.
Recoverable and irrecoverable decisions—A short read that aligns with a theory of mine—indecision is worse than a bad decision. Speed matters, and making decisions quickly is what enables it. Very few decisions are so consequential that a bad one can’t be reversed.
NetNewsWire Turns 23—A shout-out to one of the best and most polished pieces of software out there. It’s an RSS reader that does everything I’d like and nothing more.
Shared Brain by Zapier—Zapier has some of the best product people in the business. At first glance this probably looks just like ChatGPT—and it is, essentially. Glean and similar tools are trying to build ChatGPT for the enterprise. What I love here is that Zapier’s expertise is in connecting systems together—they have more than 9,000 integrations with other software products. That gives them a real competitive advantage in knowing how to pull and push information across those products. A great example of applying more leverage where a business already has it.
Advanced Manufacturing Company of America—I love mid-century corporate design. This is one of the best reinventions of that style I’ve seen. Also, it’s great to see a manufacturing business with some flair.
Capybaras Delivering Food—We started with a game and we’ll end with one. A cute little game where you play a capybara on a scooter taking and delivering DoorDash orders. Built entirely from vibes—Claude, Suno for music, ElevenLabs for voice, GPT for images and Tripo3D for 3D assets. More details in this tweet.
That’s everything for now. Appreciate you reading, and I hope you find the course useful—go check it out!
Best,
Sam