Week 15 · 2025-04-07 → 2025-04-13 · 12 newsletters

Tariff Whiplash and Coding Anxiety

tariff-whiplash · ai-and-the-coding-question · creative-craft-and-method · self-improvement-and-celebration

Seventeen emails across seven days, which is a quiet week by any measure, and the inbox knew it. The dominant thread was the trade-war volatility the White House inflicted on global markets, but the more interesting through-line was a quieter conversation about whether anyone should still learn to code after Dario Amodei's three-to-six-month timeline. Around those two anchors: a small cluster on creative method, a handful of self-improvement pieces, and a few one-offs worth flagging. No padding this week. This is what was actually there.

Tariff Whiplash: Volatility as the Story Itself

The week's only real macro piece came from The Last Bear Standing with "Twelve Casualties of the Trade War," and it was the right post for the moment. The setup: a week of historic round-tripping, Wednesday's 90-day reciprocal-tariff pause that excluded China, whose rate got cranked to 145%, one of the largest single-day rallies on record with advancing stocks beating decliners ten-to-one, and yet through Thursday's close the S&P sat up a relatively mundane 3.3% on the week. The argument: the market was operating in a brain-dead binary, more tariffs bad and less tariffs good, with equity correlation surging to multi-year highs because nobody was bothering to distinguish between companies whose cash flows would survive this and companies whose would not. Some pain was overpriced, some underpriced, and the volatility itself was crowding out the analysis that should have been happening.

The companion read was The Stonkstack on "Deep Value (Literally) Underground," which used the tariff selloff to flag that Bowim S.A., a Polish net-net the author had previously exited at a 100% gain, was back to two-thirds of NCAV at roughly 4.5 PLN. The take inside the take: most net-nets are zombie Chinese ADRs or cash-burning biotechs that used to be pizza chains, but the tariff selloff was creating real opportunities in the actually-functional ones if you bothered to read the balance sheets.

The take: writers who held a contrarian or fundamental line did better this week than writers who tried to call the macro. The market's reaction function had broken down, and the only honest move was to admit the binary was stupid and look at individual companies.

AI and the Coding Question: Amodei Lit a Fuse

The most interesting week-long thread was the response to Dario Amodei saying AI would be writing 90% of code in three to six months and essentially all of it within twelve. Jacob Voytko at Client Server ran two posts on it. The first, "You should obviously still learn to code (if you want to)," picked up Amjad Masad's follow-on tweet ("I no longer think you should learn to code") and noted that Masad moderated his position in the underlying video, where he said the no-learn case was conditional on Amodei being right within twelve months. Voytko's read was that the conditional gave Masad outs but the tweet was the more accurate signal of belief. The stance: new entrants should not panic, because the small islands of human judgment Amodei conceded, specifying conditions, design decisions, security posture, code-base integration, are not shrinking as fast as the commentary suggests.

Voytko's second post, "Helping Shopify employees game their AI promotion criteria," covered the Tobi Lutke memo that leaked and was then posted in full to X. The relevant section: AI usage is now a fundamental expectation at Shopify, AI must dominate the GSD prototype phase, and AI usage will be added to performance and peer reviews. Voytko's framing was that this is the first major CEO to formalize "stagnation is slow-motion failure" as a written promotion criterion. The piece bookends the first: if Amodei is right about the timeline, Lutke is the operator's reaction; if he is wrong, Lutke is overreacting in a way that will be embarrassing in two years.

The take: Amodei's number was the only AI conversation the inbox had this week, and the two Voytko posts together are the right way to think about it. The working answer is the same regardless of cohort: learn the tool, do not bet on the timeline. Lutke's memo is the leading edge of what tech-company performance reviews will look like by Q4.

Creative Craft and Method: Three CCOs and One Pigeon

Method Studio ran three Method Breakdowns in a single day on April 13, each profiling a Cannes-decorated CCO and decomposing their working method into bite-sized videos across five areas: creative psychology and mental resilience, concepting, presenting ideas, craft, and creative direction. Felipe Ribeiro at W+K Portland, formerly co-leading W+K Sao Paulo. Gabriel Schmitt formerly Global CCO at Grey. Guillermo Vega at Ogilvy on the Coca-Cola account. The work cited reads like a Cannes year-in-review: DoorDash All-The-Ads, Budweiser Tagwords, Michelob Ultra McEnroe Vs McEnroe, Burger King Whopper Detour, Samsung Rihanna ANTIdiaRy. The structural argument across all three is that the five-area decomposition is the same regardless of the creative, which is itself a take: the work looks different, the method does not.

The week's most charming creative-execution post came from Ben James at Ben by Fax, who installed 75 replicas of Feathers McGraw around London in a single Saturday evening. Two months of full-time 3D printing, twenty people on installation day sewing swag bags and attaching eyes, four teams deploying across Soho, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, and Mayfair, and a companion site at feathers.today where Londoners are uploading selfies with the Wallace and Gromit villain. The post is short and the photos do the work. It is also a quiet master class in how to ship a public art project: pick a beloved character, commit to physical volume, build for the lamppost not the gallery, and give the audience a URL to participate.

unsnackable ran her usual recovery-from-April-Fools roundup of snacks she actually liked: a sweet pastry from Souri, the hyper-stylized .bkk bakery, plus a savory Korean piece and an Earl Grey snacking cake with greek yogurt, passion fruit, and rose that she ate every morning for a week. The newsletter is the strongest argument in the inbox that food writing in 2025 belongs on Substack, not in the legacy magazines.

The take: the creative cluster this week was not connected to any news event, which is part of why it landed. Method Studio is building a useful long-term archive, and the Feathers piece is the kind of thing the internet was actually built for. The work that does not need a news hook tends to last longer than the work that does.

Self-Improvement and Celebration: Two Sides of the Same Question

Winning Therapy ran two posts this week, the Q&A and the Sunday "Vault" roundup. The Q&A is the cleaner read: maximize vitality through sleep and nutrition, remove all forms of escapism, pick an ambitious goal, act and iterate, protect momentum like your life depends on it, never quit. The Cal Newport excerpt on Steve Martin's banjo strategy, the willingness to look forty years into the future for the payoff and the redefinition of diligence as the willingness to ignore other pursuits that distract you, was the line worth saving.

Alec McNayr ran the more poetic version: the number of possible shuffled-deck orderings is 8 with 67 zeroes after it, more than the atoms in our solar system, so the case for treating yourself as a non-repeating event is statistically defensible. The post is essentially the opening monologue from his Westside Story Club show, but the framing lands.

The companion piece was Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma on "Throw Confetti, Not Apologies," about the annual twinge of judgment when sending birthday-party invites and the deliberate decision to plan a Play Buffet instead: a costumed dinner styled by her six-year-old, an inter-generational sing-along, a Pink Party dance rager, and an afternoon of desserts and doodles. The argument: play connects deeper than catch-up conversation, and the proof is in the specific scenes, reconnecting with a friend after six years through swaying with arms over each other's shoulders rather than talking. The post is the most quietly subversive in the cluster, because it makes the case that taking up space is itself the practice.

Maalvika opened the week with "when & how to leave your mediocre relationship," which is the same instinct from the dark side: the cost of not celebrating yourself is years of rehearsed "we're fine"s. The post is a teaser truncation in the feed, but the headline does the work.

The take: the self-improvement cluster this week was tighter than it usually is, because three of the four pieces are arguing the same thing from different angles. The Winning Therapy line on the guarantee of brutal defeats before glory and the Noomalooma line on declaring you are worth celebrating are not in conflict. They are the same argument about what it costs to take yourself seriously.

Other Notes

Zarik Khan at Fintech Compliance Chronicles ran two posts: an invite to Compliance & Pastries during NY Fintech Week with ComplyCo, and a podcast with Pam Kaur and Katie Quilligan of BankTech Ventures on community-bank fintech investment. Internal Tech Emails teased a piece titled "Let's leverage this position now!!!!" but the body was truncated to the subscribe CTA.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The market was the loudest story of the week, but it was not the most interesting one. The tariff round-tripping produced one good post from Last Bear Standing and one good adjacent post from Stonkstack on Bowim, and that was it. Most other writers stayed quiet, which is the right call when the underlying story is just "the administration is changing its mind every six hours."

The AI-and-coding conversation is the one to carry forward. Amodei's twelve-month claim is the kind of statement that either ages incredibly well or becomes a Vine-era meme by 2027, and Lutke's Shopify memo is the first major CEO commitment that treats the timeline as already settled. The fact that both posts came from Voytko in the same week is the reason to bookmark Client Server going forward. The new-developer cohort needs better answers than the inbox gave them this week.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest The Last Bear Standing on "Twelve Casualties of the Trade War" for the cleanest read on why the market's binary reaction was wrong, Jacob Voytko's "You should obviously still learn to code" for the most honest answer to the Amodei question, and Ben James on installing 75 Feathers McGraws across London for the post that has nothing to do with any of this and is the best thing you will read all week.