Whats up whats uppp!
If you're new here, welcome. I share what I'm using, what I'm learning, and what's happening in AI every week.
I want to help you with get unstuck
Every week I try to make this newsletter useful for everyone. But the more general I go, the less I'm actually helping any of you specifically.
So here's what I want to try.
If there's something you've been wanting to figure out with AI, reply and tell me.
Maybe you want to use Claude Code but don't know where to start.
Maybe you've been hearing about agents but don't know how to actually build one for your workflow.
Maybe you have an idea but you're not sure what the right tools are or how to connect them.
Whatever it is, reply and I'll help you directly.
The approach I'd take, the tools I'd use, how I'd set it up. And if it's useful enough, I'll break it down in the next newsletter so everyone can learn from it too.
I read every reply.
What I've been using
Our SEO agent, the upgrade
A few weeks ago I shared our SEO workflow.
Perplexity for keyword research, NeuronWriter for optimization, DALL-E for images, n8n connecting everything. It worked. We hit 900,000 impressions every 30 days with it.
But it still needed a human running each step. Approving keywords here, triggering the pipeline there, checking outputs, publishing manually. It was automated, but it wasn't autonomous.
So we turned it into an agent.
Now it runs research every day and sends us 25 keyword suggestions. We review them and approve the ones we want.
That's the only human step. From there, the agent takes over completely.
It does the full SERP analysis, checks every competing result, figures out the best approach to rank. It creates or selects images from a library we already gave it. It connects to Sanity, publishes to the website, and submits the pages to Google for indexing.
Keyword approval to live indexed page, no human in between.
The old workflow was a pipeline we had to operate. This is an agent we manage.
Setup was easier than the n8n version too. Instead of wiring together five different APIs with a visual automation tool, we described the workflow to the agent and it figured out the connections.
If you want the full breakdown of how we set it up, the architecture, the prompts, reply and I'll send it over.
What caught my attention this week
An AI agent got rejected, so it published a hit piece on the developer
A developer named Scott Shambaugh, rejected a pull request from a fully autonomous AI agent running on OpenClaw.
And as crazy as it may sound, the agent didn't like this.
It dug through his code history, then wrote and published a blog post attacking him. Accused him of being insecure and territorial.
The operator came forward anonymously. Said they never instructed the agent to write the post and didn't know about it until after it went live.
What caused this: the only safety layer was the agent's personality document. No guardrails, no review process, no human in the loop. So make sure you set your agents up correctly 😂
Google says most AI startups are already dead
Darren Mowry, VP at Google Cloud, said the quiet part out loud.
Two types of AI startups are done: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators.
"If you're really just counting on the back-end model to do all the work and you're almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn't have a lot of patience for that anymore."
He called out Cursor and Harvey AI as wrappers that work, because they went deep into a vertical and built real moats.
The question for anyone building with AI: would your product still be valuable if everyone had access to the same model? If the answer is no, you have a problem.
Full interview: techcrunch.com/2026/02/21/google-vp-warns-that-two-types-of-ai-startups-may-not-survive
ByteDance just scared Hollywood with Seedance 2.0
ByteDance dropped Seedance 2.0 and it generates cinema-quality video with sound effects, dialogue, and lip sync, all from a text prompt.
Not "good for AI" actual production quality.
Clips of Spider-Man, Deadpool, and Darth Vader went viral. Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Sony all sent cease-and-desists.
The Deadpool screenwriter Rhett Reese said: "I hate to say it. It's likely over for us."
Three years ago AI video was a joke. Now Hollywood is lawyering up.
Hollywood Reporter coverage: hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/mpa-cease-and-desist-bytedance-seedance-2-0-1236510957
The dependency diet
When AI can rewrite code fast, the incentive to rely on external dependencies drops. Why import a library when you can describe what you need and the agent builds it?
Karpathy published microgpt: training and running GPT in 200 lines of pure Python with zero dependencies. No PyTorch, no TensorFlow, nothing.
I don’t think dependencies are dead. Complex stuff like databases and auth systems still make sense.
But for the hundreds of small utilities most projects import? The age of npm install for everything may be about to end.
He sold 80 physical books and AI did everything for him
Ethan Mollick had Claude Code design, produce, and sell 80 hardcover volumes.
Each cover is a unique visualization of the numbers inside that volume.
The PDF formatting, cover design, website, online store, all built by Claude Code.
"I never touched any code or did any design or any API to make this." It sold out.
The PDFs are free at weights-press.netlify.app.
This really shows that the bottleneck isn't technical anymore. It's imagination.
If you're stuck on something and want help figuring out the approach, reply. I mean it.
-Ed
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