(and a small change to how we run these) Hello everyone!! 👋 First, the honest bit. This one is landing later than Monday, and on purpose. Two things got us here. One, a lot more of you are submitting now. If I am going to really sit with every entry and give it a proper look, a weekend is not enough. This round I went through all of them, watched the videos, opened the repos, the full pass. That takes time and I would rather do it right than rush it. Two, I could feel a few of you running hot. Weekly is a sprint, and burnout was starting to creep in for some. So we are moving to bi-weekly. More room to build, more room to breathe, and the time for me to actually review the work the way it deserves. 🎥 Quick word on the videos. They were a step up this round. Some of the animated walkthroughs and live demos were a genuine pleasure to watch, and yes, I weigh them. A clean demo that shows the thing actually working makes a real difference. However I don't want that to ALWAYS be a requirement. Also you will notice the Heavy hitters that you usually see up here are not currently, some posted late and I decided to let the new entries and first timers also have a chance as well! But certainly, check the original post as every submission has something for you to learn from : 💰 Competition 7 ➖➖➖ 🛠️ A FEW THAT STOOD OUT (in no order, and if you didn't make it, it doesn't mean yours wasn't great) The Pipeline Operator — @Jayden Forshee Runs a whole sales pipeline. Paste a lead and it grades it, writes the outreach, and moves the card itself. The live board where you watch cards move on their own, sat right next to a normal chatbot, was one of the clearest ways anyone has shown what an operator actually is. https://github.com/griffainai/studio-pipeline-operator Board: https://pipeline-operator.vercel.app/board

You guys keep liking and commenting on my confession posts, so here's another one. I wish at least one of these confessions wasn't real. They're all real (sad face). For the AI nerds in here (so, all of us): I think I'm addicted. It's worse than being hooked on a video game. A game at least has the decency to feel like a waste of time. This feels productive. Sometimes it actually is. At 1am, running six seven sessions at once? Not so much. ------------------------------------ What my nights have turned into ------------------------------------ Multiple Claude sessions going at once. When it got late and I knew I should be in bed, I'd flip every one of them with the /remote-control command so I could keep feeding the machine from my phone. Lying there in the dark. Waiting for the little dot to show up that means it's done thinking. Fire off the next instruction. Wait for the dot again. It's a slot machine. Drop the coins, pull the lever, watch for the dot. Like a freaking addict. One evening this week (I think it was Tuesday) I had three sessions all editing the same end-of-day file, and they kept overwriting each other's work. I'm sitting there getting genuinely angry. Then I caught myself cursing out a piece of software. Out loud. "You BLEEP, you broke it again." And I stopped. It's a machine, Ruben. Why are you getting triggered by a machine? And who's really doing the breaking? ------------------------------------ So I asked the machine why I can't quit the machine ------------------------------------ I did what any self-respecting addict does. I used the thing I'm addicted to, to figure out why I'm addicted to it. I'd read The Goal a while back (the Theory of Constraints novel everybody in operations swears by). I reopened it, had Claude walk me through the main concepts and tie them back to my business. And it clicked: I'm the bottleneck. My time, my attention. Not my team. Not my tools. Me. Then came the part that actually stung. The optimizing itself was the bottleneck. I'd been spending multiple two-hour sessions buffing an end-of-day routine whose entire job is to take fifteen minutes. The thing I kept "improving" stopped being my constraint years ago. I just couldn't put it down.

Every major technology came with a confident prediction that it would ruin us. We innovated our way around every single one. I think back to The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, and that's the part that sticks with me. His argument is simple. Look back at any big leap, the railways, electricity, the factory, the car; and you'll find serious people warning it would wreck health, wreck jobs, wreck society. The warnings were genuine. They were also wrong, almost every time, because human ingenuity kept doing the thing it always does: it innovated the disaster out of existence before the disaster arrived. The predicted catastrophe assumes everyone stands still and lets it happen. People never do. Now I read my feed about AI. Same shape. Same certainty that this time the sky really is falling, that this is the one technology we won't adapt to. I'm not saying there's nothing to be careful about. There always is. What I'm saying is that the doom story is not new, and the track record of that story is terrible. The optimistic case isn't blind hope. It's just history. Every time we've handed ourselves a more powerful tool, we've also figured out how to live with it. I think AI is the next entry on that list, not the exception to it. https://youtube.com/shorts/kECtKHQYjgI?si=7AbSfzOdr-2BTgTg

@Curtis Hays just dropped the capstone on a series I've been watching build in real time — and it's the one I'd send you to if you're tired of AI advice that sounds right and moves nothing. THE MIRROR AND THE WINDOW. The whole essay hangs on one distinction Curtis borrowed from Tom Nixon and then stress-tested against years of client work: most of us treat the Why like a mirror. Sit down, look inward, write what you see, call it true. It reads fine. It never shapes a decision. Tom's move is the window. Go to the people who buy. Listen to what they say about themselves. Find the reason they already had — don't invent one in a conference room. Curtis makes the AI parallel land hard. The default posture — "you are a helpful assistant" — is the same mistake rebuilt. Declared, not excavated. Instructions, not scars. A system that performs confidence without having earned it. The line that stuck with me: "AI did not generate it. AI revealed it." That's the through-line of everything Curtis has been working out loud in David's Corner. Not magic. Not infrastructure theater. A system for protecting and scaling judgment — built from real client work, real corrections, real belief layers that took months before the fifteen-minute setup felt easy. He didn't phone this in. Seven essays. One arc. From perception gap to worldview engineering to outsourcing the typing while keeping the thinking — and now Solve for Why. Archaeologists, not architects. I gave Curtis the section to work it out loud. He did the work. If you haven't read the series yet, start here: 👉 David's Corner → Curtis Hays — Systems Worth Amplifying (https://www.skool.com/cliefnotes/classroom/c7f102c7?md=dba87827cdff47449034a8368d492e48) Read them in order. The intro maps the whole thread. The Mirror and the Window is the payoff — but you'll feel it more if you've walked the path. And if you've already built something that started in the community and ended up as doctrine — drop what you're working on below. Curtis surfaced his in the open. That's how this place actually works.

is any one using Hermes as there harness? personally i have been happy that i did all the starter classes here with a VS Code so i at least know what i am doing when getting the beast of something like hermes and LM Studio working.