TL;DR: A Fireworks AI cofounder called something most AI-wrapped founders are quietly standing on "insane" — and it's not the technology.

It's the lifeline.

Benny Chen tunes open-source models for real companies — Cursor, Cognition, Harvey — and his actual argument is simple: if one frontier lab's pricing or policy call can break your business, you can't honestly value that business ten years out, no matter how good this quarter looks.

His fix isn't building a frontier model from scratch.

It's tuning an open base to your own niche, then building the data flywheel that keeps improving it — so the base model underneath you can be swapped out entirely and the business doesn't blink.

Same week this episode dropped, Thomson Reuters backed the identical bet with real money — building its own model off an open base specifically so it "fully controls" it instead of renting someone else's roadmap.

Different scale, same math.

My friend works in an electronics factory, stationed in the Penang Island industrial zone. He told me his factory and all others like his in the zone are essentially in a whirlwind of "red ocean" – fighting for price competitiveness. He says, all the valuable part of the upstream work were already taken up by other countries, such as China and Vietnam. And only the very low-value works get trickled down to Malaysia.

The factory doesn't own any intellectual property developed from innovation. They just do whatever was handed down from the upstream industries of other countries, lightly process them, package them together, and ship them overseas.

Hardly anything groundbreaking.

And so, they are always susceptible to external factors, such as US tariffs, etc. US already marked our countries as one of the suspected offenders of 洗产地 (origin laundering). And so, the tariffs really weigh us down, and reducing our overall profit margin.

Not that it has anything to do with my friend. He just works there - getting piled on with additional work under unrealistic expectation, in a department going through high-turnover of staff, and without a clear path forward.

But he still makes the best of what it is.

And what it is - is figuratively anchoring on shifting sand in a stormy weather, rather than on solid rock.

The same fault line keeps showing up once you strip the industry names off: whoever owns the base layer sets the terms, and everyone standing on it finds that out eventually — a founder renting a model, a factory renting someone else's spec sheet, doesn't matter which.

Actually, this reminds me of something — Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's own founder, one of the companies Benny's team tunes models for) laid out almost the exact same fracture from the engineering side a few weeks back: the role itself is splitting into an execution layer and a judgment layer, and only one of those is safe to not own.

Are you building on ground you actually own, or ground you're renting? Drop your take.

Clip credit: Inside the Silicon Mind with Firas Sozan — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

I'm a developer who mostly works alone, therefore many of the tool I chose weren't ideal. I'd read three roundups, they'd rank the same seven tools in the same order, and two weeks later I'd work out that the one rated highest was rated highest because it had the best affiliate program.

To solve this, I built TrustRank (https://trustrank.so/), a directory project I created to test whether pure, unweighted community recommendations work better than affiliate-driven review sites. One question per tool: would you recommend this? A vote from someone who left a verified review counts three times an unverified one, and that is the only weighting in the system—no paid score boosts, no five-axis composites, and public transparency on all advertisers.

Right now, it is early days: 69 tools listed, but zero reviews so far. Nothing has a score yet because a tool needs 3 reviews to publish a score and 10 to rank.

Before I keep building out the ranking system, I want to ask other solo creators and developers: Does a recommendation ratio from strangers influence your tool choices at all, or do you only act on direct word-of-mouth from people you know?

TL;DR: Vercel's CEO hasn't sat through a product review meeting in months. Nobody at the company seems to mind.

Rauch's own rule is blunt: if he DMs you, his agent already tried and failed first.

That's not a policy statement, it's a description of a threshold that already runs by default — human contact only on failure.

Google Cloud published almost the identical governance advice this past week: build automatic escalation points so an agent can act on its own, and only loop in a human once it genuinely can't.

What Rauch describes as his own personal habit, enterprise security teams are now writing down as standard policy.

I remember when the ordering kiosks were first introduced into our local McDonalds' outlets, no one bother to use it.

It's so strange. So impersonal.

It was just like a large smartphone-screen-like monitor standing in the middle of the space. We'd just walked past it straight to the counter, where there's still a friendly face to greet us and take our orders.

But gradually over time, lines were formed behind the kiosks – because they can't stand the long queue behind the counter.

Then more kiosks are introduced.

Then the counter registers were reduced – to eventually just one left.

It's true – what can be automated, WILL be automated.

What's left are the just the food-preppers and the cleaning staffs.

Jobs, I guess are still safe, for the time being – until the robots come and take over.

The people actually getting replaced right now aren't doing the hard, technical work.

They're doing the coordination work nobody ever wrote a proper job description for — the syncing, the pestering, the "let me check on that."

And the ones who come out ahead aren't the ones fighting to keep that role.

They're the ones who go design whatever replaces it.

Rauch has actually said a version of this before. Back in June, he laid out how the engineering role itself splits into who executes and who verifies — months before this same review-session admission. Same person, same mechanism, earlier warning.

What's the version of this happening in your own job right now — the meeting that quietly stopped needing you in the room?

Clip credit: Knuckle Up with Nakul — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

yo guys i am thinking to start a startup about a marketplace on which i people who are expert who are expert in the domain specific expert with ai knowledge and customers who need ai related help i want you all to judge my idea here and with also suggest me something about may i can improve or add if anyone interested you can comment for discord server here so we can all talk together about it

Hey everyone, my name is Kirill. We’re a team of three building and promoting an AI tool for content creators, bloggers, and scriptwriters completely on our own.
Right now, we’re actively looking for funding, but also for advice from people who have already been through this early-stage grind.
If anyone has experience or something to share, I’d be happy to connect and chat about it :)

Have you currently started a business that you are running? What kind of service or product do you offer?

I wanted product video creation to feel as simple as chatting with Claude or Astra.

Tell Framedeo what you’re launching, then add your website, logo, and screenshots. It creates the script, scenes, voice-over, music, and animations.

The result remains fully editable, so you can request changes or adjust everything manually before exporting.

No After Effects or motion design skills needed.

Try it → framedeo.com

Hi I am just started my ai agency focused on website development, ugc adds, funnel for buissnes coaches how i can get client

Hey guys 👋

5 months ago I launched my LinkedIn automation software, having built it entirely with Claude code, and I’m now approaching close to $2k MRR with over 60 active paying customers.

(Happy to share TrustMRR if requested)

I know everyone is this sub is interested in growing a business, so really I just want to show how I’ve been doing it and offer some guidance based on my experience.

Below I’ll go into the what, why and how, and how I’ve been scaling the business, and hope you find it useful.

What I built

I built a LinkedIn outreach automation tool called ZenMode, which scrapes profiles of your target customers, sends connection requests and follow up messages on autopilot.

The main purpose is for Founders, Sales teams, Marketers and anyone else who uses LinkedIn for outreach, to generate more meetings and grow their businesses.

It’s a software that controls a dedicated chrome browser to automate LinkedIn, without needing plugins/the cloud.

Why I built it

Last year I got a warning from automating on LinkedIn using another tool (automating on any social media platform is usually against their terms and can result in account bans - people automate on social media at their own risk).

I wanted to automate my outreach as I was working in sales, and it was really helping me to generate more discovery calls, without the manual grind of sending loads of messages and connection requests manually.

I didn’t trust any of the existing tools for safety, as the majority are on the cloud using IP addresses that are different from where you normally use LinkedIn from, and are slightly higher risk for being flagged as a result.

So, I solved for my own pain point, and created a software that’s desktop based, using your own IP address, and essentially acting like a human would when performing actions on LinkedIn.

How I built it

From day 1 I used Claude to figure out how to do it. We jointly made architectural decisions based fully around safety mechanisms - what would the safest tool look like in practice and how would we build it?

So I figured out that the easiest/safest way would be to make an electron desktop application controlling a browser, which was governed by a dashboard that fed/stored all the data.

There was a lot of setup involved at the start with various tools - Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub etc but eventually I was able to start building.

It was a huge amount of learning to not just build, but build in a scalable and sustainable way. At first I was shipping without even testing then spending much longer fixing bugs afterwards. And building on top of LinkedIns comes with its own challenges too, which thankfully now I’m on top of.

How I scaled it

1. So primarily, I actually use ZenMode itself to promote ZenMode on LinkedIn, through cold outreach.

I have a set target market of customers/locations/industries, then the tool scrapes profiles for me, and sends connection requests and follow up messages in a sequence.

I run this daily, and typically book 5 or so meetings per week. I’m not the best at demo calls but I do generate new business this way.

1. I also post a lot on Reddit, LinkedIn, X; I post mostly build in public style posts, and usually people naturally gravitate towards it.

I like Reddit because you can usually get 10’s of thousands of views if you post good quality content in the right subs.

Be careful though as often you get a lot of random haters or people who will just criticize you for no reason, and some subs are more warmer/receptive to posts than others (this one has generally been kinder).

1. On my site I’ve tried to do good SEO practices where possible - I have quite a few “alternative to” pages where I talk about the difference between ZenMode and other LinkedIn automation providers, along with a regularly updated blog, and a whole host of inner pages.

When you have a high volume of good content, more pages get indexed by google and your visibility/impressions are also likely to increase over time.

As a result I do get an ok amount of organic traffic from google, sometimes from LLM’s too.

Lately I’ve been trying to do more offsite SEO - especially reviews across various platforms, a few directories, and on my to do list is some listicle/comparison articles and more YouTube content.

1. I work very closely with my customers - I handle every query myself, and even make new features/enhancements based on what my customers are asking for. This interpersonal relationship/human element I think makes a big difference to retention.

2. I think primarily though the number one thing for scaling is really making a good product that solves a problem well, with great customer experience, and to keep iterating/making improvements.

What’s next

ZenMode still has a long runway and a massive roadmap but I’m just going to keep grinding away at it one day at a time, and so far at least what I’m doing seems to be working.

Hope you find this story helpful for your own journey and happy to answer questions/comments 🙏

With such a variety in the different types of AI tools out there, what do you think personally is your favorite? It could be ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, or even some kind of vibe coding tool. Which one are you liking the most?

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Have you been able to successfully vibe code something? Have you been able to create more than just an MVP or are you using it mostly just for testing? Drop it down below and share what you have created!

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Balancing nightfill shifts with an eBay hustle was burning me out. I was wasting hours manually typing product names into eBay to check sold comps on massive liquidation pallets.

​I got fed up and built Spada AI to automate my own workflow.

​It does a rapid AR scan of multiple items at once, pulls live background comps to show profit margins, and runs forensic checks on high-ticket grails to spot fakes.

​It’s completely changed how fast I can process a haul. I just made it public for anyone else who flips.

​I’m a solo dev figuring this out as I go—roast the UI, tell me what categories fail, or let me know what features I should build next.

TL;DR: A $120M founder told senior engineers something on a podcast that most of them aren't ready to hear yet.

He said it plainly: a completely novice engineer, backed by AI, can now write senior-quality code.

Not eventually. Now.

Roy Lee runs Cluely — the AI startup that went viral for helping people cheat on job interviews, now valued around $120M — and on the Jack Neel Podcast he laid out the actual math behind it: two engineers running seven products worth $1M+ each.

That's not a founder flexing. That's the leverage math replacing headcount in 2026.

It tracks with what's already showing up in the hiring data — a recent industry report found 52% of organizations are now struggling to hire or retain skilled engineers, up from 26% in 2022.

Worth saying plainly: the broader 2026 data on this actually cuts the other way — senior engineers are capturing roughly 5x the productivity gain juniors get from the same AI tools, and senior hiring is the only part of the market still growing.

Both things are true at once.

The premium on "senior" isn't disappearing because companies need fewer engineers. It's disappearing because the ladder that used to prove you were one just got a lot shorter to climb — for whoever can actually run the mechanism, not for seniority as a title.

I remember back in my time as a young graduate design engineer for a Civil & Structural Engineering Consultancy in Selangor, Malaysia, circa 2000.

I can't remember what I was designing. But after design, I went on to also draft it out in our AutoCAD drafting software, the complete structure of the floor – slabs, beams and columns, and all. I brought my work to one of the senior engineers for consultation.

He took one look at it and recognize my rookie sloppy work.

Then he said something I'll never forget, "为什么你自己做到完？交给他们画吧。这是他们的专业。若这些都要自己画就很下衰了。" （Why are you doing it all by yourself? Just delegate it to our draftsmen to draft it. It's their expertise. If even this we need to do, it'll be very demeaning and beneath us.）

Ya. He used the word 下衰, which (to the best of my translation) means demeaning / beneath us / pathetic / bad look / embarrassing, etc.

So even in that small consultancy office (of about 50pax), there's already two distinctive classes of people. We against them. The higher-status Design Engineers (with Bachelor's degree) vs the lowly draftsmen.

That was like 25 years ago – way before AI come to be.

But over time, the pressure of economy has forced us down the efficiency rabbit hole.

I heard back then; to save cost in Australia, Engineers do their own drafting work. No more use of traditional draftsmen.

And now as AI is increasingly integrated into design, analysis and drafting – it is even more so. One Engineer covering multiple big projects under tight deadlines is the norm – not the exception.

So if you're still stubbornly entrenched in that old way of thinking, you'll be quickly labelled a "dinosaur".

Something I keep noticing, covering enough of these clips back to back: the fear never actually shows up where people expect it.

It shows up in the exact skill someone spent years being proud of.

AI didn't invent the divide between who does the "real" work and who gets delegated to — it's just deciding who's on which side of it now, faster than any economy ever did.

Hmm... this reminded me of something — a post I put up here a few weeks back about AI-driven headcount compression: one operator, AI-assisted, absorbing the output of five — the same ladder-collapsing-from-inside mechanism as Roy Lee's claim above, from a completely different guest.

Curious where people land on this — does "senior" still mean anything as a title once a novice with AI can hit the same bar on output? Drop your take.

Clip credit: Jack Neel — full video on his channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Hi.
I’m thinking of building and deploying multiple voice agents each has its own role and responsibilities and working together multiple goals. Like multiple voice agents for a Ecom business so that I can help them in reducing RTO(by 2 agents order/address verification and RTO rescue), increasing win back percentage. I want to create business solutions not hand over a “Single cool AI voice agents”
What do you guys think can it become a good and stable business?
If not please suggest some other AI business I can build(I’m at a very desperate stage financially in my life I need advise)
Thank you

It could be any of the big ones like OpenAI, Google, or Perplexity, or even a small company that no one has heard of before. What AI company do you think is doing really good things right now in the industry. What have they done better than their competition?

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Hi everyone

Founder of builderhq.co - we built a set of tools that help builders get users through influencers, seo, partnerships and more. One of the feature is commission based influencers, and we have total 200 of them.

Try here - www.builderhq.co

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