Whats up whats uppp!
Why you're getting this: I'm sharing some tools and approaches we use at Sidetool and personally. I think you'll find them useful.
Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if this isn't for you.
Let's get into it.
What I've been using
I built myself an AI chief of staff
Every Monday at 8am I get an email with a complete picture of my business.
What shipped, what's stuck, how the pipeline looks, how the team is feeling, key conversations I would have missed. All pulled automatically from the tools I already use.
Anything with an API can feed into this, your project management tool, CRM, team chat, call recordings, whatever matters to you.
It pulls the data, runs it through GPT-5.2, and sends you a summary.
I blurred the details and simplified it for this post, if you want the full version just lmk.
You can share it with your team or keep it for yourself.
Took me an afternoon to set up and it costs around $2 a month.
I used to spend a lot of time every week checking everything manually. Now I get a 2-minute read that actually catches things I was missing, like a team member frustrated about something or a deal going cold.
Reply if you want me to walk you through how to set this up.
I used to have tasks scattered everywhere. Emails, Slack messages, Linear tickets, Notion notes.
Half of them weren’t even in a to-do list, they were just floating around in my head or buried in some thread.
This tool pulls all of that into one place and lets me drag tasks onto my calendar to block time for them. It also combines all my calendars so I actually see what my week looks like.
It may sound simple but it changed how I work. Instead of a list of things I'll "get to eventually," I'm scheduling when I'm actually doing them.
What caught my attention this week
Agent Skills are now an open standard
I implemented Agent Skills in my Warp setup a few months ago. It's a spec that lets you create folders with instructions and context that AI agents load on demand, instead of dumping everything into context every conversation.
I have 54 of these now. Python, backend architecture, database optimization, business workflows, health data analysis.
My active context dropped from 7,600 lines to around 1,500. Faster, cheaper, way more accurate.
This week Anthropic published it as an open standard. Now skills are portable across Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, wherever. Microsoft adopted it. Atlassian, Figma, Notion, Zapier, Stripe are launch partners.
Spec is at agentskills.io.
I wrote a full breakdown of how I set this up, the folder structure, how Warp discovers them, everything. Reply if you want it.
You can now tell ChatGPT to calm down
OpenAI added sliders for warmth, enthusiasm, and emoji use.
You can set each to More, Less, or Default in Personalization settings. If you've ever found ChatGPT too eager or too sycophantic, this is the fix.
They basically offloaded the tone problem to users, which honestly makes sense.
Solo founder sells 6-month-old startup for $80M
Maor Shlomo bootstrapped Base44 with $10-20K. Six months later, Wix bought it for $80 million cash.
$0 to $1M ARR in 3 weeks.
140K users in 7 weeks.
By the acquisition he had 250K users and $200K monthly profit.
He shared the journey here:
Greg Isenberg put it well: "You don't need a cofounder anymore. You need AI teammates."
38% of new US startups are now solo founders with no VC. Almost double what it was in 2015.
However… Vibe coding is creating a $4 billion cleanup problem
Remember when Karpathy coined "vibe coding"?
Now the bill is coming due.
Alex Turnbull (@iamAlexTurnbull), founder of Groove, spent 12 months building two AI products.
His take: "VibeCoding didn't get us there. Only real engineering could."
A feature that looked simple took a senior engineer three months to build correctly. That's the gap between "it runs" and "a business can trust it."
Roughly 10,000 startups tried to build production apps with AI. More than 8,000 now need rebuilds. The total cleanup cost? Somewhere between $400 million and $4 billion.
One quote Gary Marcus shared: "I am giving up on creating anything anymore. Every time there are more errors. I've been working on it for 3 months... but every time I want to change a little thing, I kill 4 days debugging other things that go south."
The prediction is that "rescue engineering" will be the hottest discipline in 2026. Doesn't mean AI coding is bad, just that there's a difference between a demo and something real.
Wanted to thank Adri Cabrera for sharing this newsletter with his network. Adri is building MailMaestro, an AI email assistant that works right inside Outlook and Gmail. Check them out at maestrolabs.com.
By the way, I like to shout out everyone helping us grow. So if you share this with a friend and they subscribe, just let me know, you're in the next one.
That's it for this week.
If you try any of these, or have thoughts on what's happening, reply. I read everything.
-Ed
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