Week 19 · 2025-05-05 → 2025-05-11 · 13 newsletters

Side Projects and Slow Practice

ai-as-creative-material · platforms-cracking-open · creative-practice-as-discipline · geopolitics-and-industry

Thirteen emails across seven days. The inbox in early May 2025 was thin enough that no single industry story dominated, but a real through-line did emerge: writers and builders working out, in public, what it looks like to make things when the tools have changed underneath them. A few platform-shift dispatches, a long Russia-oil report, a Taiwan school-fair vignette, and a small cluster of essays on creative practice. That was the week.

AI as Creative Material: Side Projects, Not Slide Decks

The two strongest pieces in the inbox were both about what happens when an individual builder treats AI as a medium rather than a productivity tool. Ben James at Ben by Fax wrote the most useful AI-build dispatch of the week, a teardown of londonunderground.live, his 3D real-time map of the London Underground built with TfL's live arrivals API. Eighty percent of the code was written by AI. The honest part is where he names what AI was bad at (identifying bugs in the train-tracking pipeline) and what it was great at (writing custom debug tools, including a 1D dashboard that let him scrub through time to see how API predictions shifted between requests). The Hacker News traffic spike that pushed him to four million Maptiler tile requests in twenty-four hours, and the sponsor who stepped up within fifteen minutes of a tweet, is the side-project economics story buried inside the build story.

The companion piece came from Carly Ayres at AIR, announcing applications for Cohort One of the AI Residency program (10 weeks in Carroll Gardens, $500K for 10% equity, backed by Collaborative Fund and Fictive Kin). The pitch is explicitly aesthetic: "design will be the differentiator," AI as "creative material," software as "a cultural object, not just a technical one." Cohort Zero already ran with seven designers and engineers including sessions with Alejandro Matamala Ortiz from Runway. The bet is that the next wave of AI products will win on feel, not feature parity.

The take: these two pieces sit on the same axis. Ben James shipped a thing because AI made the cost of starting low enough that "for fun" was a reasonable answer. AIR is institutionalizing exactly that posture. The interesting AI work in May 2025 is not the model releases; it is the cohort of independent builders treating the models as raw material for emotionally resonant objects. The slide-deck AI conversation and the side-project AI conversation are diverging fast.

Platforms Cracking Open: Spotify Moves in a Day

Jacob Voytko at Client Server wrote the cleanest engineering-curiosity piece of the week, asking how Spotify managed to ship a US iOS app update twenty-four hours after the April 30 ruling against Apple's anti-steering provisions. The post starts with appropriate outrage (Spotify previously could not even display the price of a Premium subscription inside its own app, only the text "You can't upgrade to Premium in the app. We know, it's not ideal") and then turns into a thought experiment about what kind of release machinery you need to have already built to flip a feature live in a day. The implicit answer: Spotify had the code waiting, lawyer-reviewed, behind a feature flag, and only needed the legal clearance to push.

This was the week's only real platform-governance story, and it landed because Voytko refused to treat the headline as the story. The story was the operational discipline of an organization that knew the ruling was coming and prepared for it. The take: when the regulator finally moves, the companies that benefit are the ones that built the launch readiness six months earlier. Most won't have.

Creative Practice as Discipline: Writing, Dancing, Cooking, Coding

A surprisingly cohesive small cluster ran on the theme of practice itself, the unglamorous reps that produce the thing. Ben Kassoy at A Strawberry Spinning Like A Dreidel announced his next FUTURE CASTLES creative writing workshop with the Jordan Peele line about first drafts being "shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles." Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma launched Permission To Play, Edition 001 on dance, with research links on movement and creativity (The Guardian on physical movement changing idea generation, Wired on dance integrating physical activity, music, mindfulness, and social connection). The thesis is that the body is a creative input, not a creative interruption.

folu at unsnackable ran the kitchen version of the same instinct, a piece on "sauce-first" meal planning where the constraint of starting with a single sauce (a preserved-lemon double-yolk mayo, riffed across a bao platter, a pizza-flavored ranch on focaccia-crouton salad, whipped feta on snap peas) generates the week's cooking without freezing the cook into "choose-your-own-topic" paralysis. It is a Madho-friendly piece because it names the actual cognitive trick: removing the starting decision frees the riffing.

The take: three writers in three different domains arguing that the constraint comes first, the work comes after. The shared insight is that creativity is what fills a box you have already built, not what you summon from nothing. In a week where two of the AI pieces were about builders shipping fast because the tools removed friction, this cluster is the quieter counterpoint that the friction was sometimes the point.

Geopolitics and Industry: One Heavy Report, One Compliance Conversation

Craig Kennedy at Navigating Russia ran the week's most substantive industry piece, "Moscow's Fading Shadow Fleet," arguing that 2025 sanctions have cut Russia's shadow tanker capacity by roughly 46% without destabilizing energy markets, forcing Russian exporters back onto sanctions-compliant mainstream tankers. Kennedy's policy point is that this dependence creates fresh leverage for measures that reduce either revenue per barrel or overall export volumes, both of which would squeeze war finances. With ceasefire negotiations stalled, the report reads as a memo to whichever Western policymaker is willing to use the opening.

Zarik Khan at Fintech Compliance Chronicles ran Podcast #10 with Sanjeev Menon, Managing Partner at Madison-Davis, a fintech compliance recruitment conversation aimed squarely at hiring managers building compliance and financial-crimes programs. Niche, but the kind of operator-to-operator content that the larger fintech press tends to miss.

The take: these two pieces are the week's reminder that the unglamorous infrastructure conversations (sanctions enforcement, compliance hiring) are where the actual leverage lives. Kennedy's piece in particular is the kind of report that gets cited six months later when policy moves. Worth saving.

Grace Notes

Alec McNayr wrote "Infinitely Discontented," a meditation on his 14-year-old daughter's incomprehension that texts once cost ten cents apiece, and the broader question of whether the all-you-can-eat subscription life is actually better than the per-text one. Gabby Lord at OMG Lord flagged Config 2025 announcements, particularly Figma Sites. Gretchen McCulloch sent her late-2024 Lingthusiasm wrap, including the New York Times' list of 5 Podcasts for Word Nerds (Lingthusiasm, The Allusionist, Words Unravelled, The Vocal Fries, A Way With Words) and a tribute to sociolinguist Bill Labov. Sean Ellis opened a "What Is Growth?" essay prompted by a live Maven session question, the kind of definitional reset that founder-stage operators benefit from periodically. And JJ Chou wrote a Taiwanese school-fair vignette about his son's last elementary-school carnival and the family debate over what to sell (winning answer: strawberry red tea).

Three Takeaways from the Week

The strongest signal in a thin week was the AI-as-creative-material thread. Ben James shipping a tube-tracking 3D map for fun and AIR institutionalizing the design-led AI cohort are two points on the same line, and that line is going to define the interesting AI-product work for the rest of 2025. The slide-deck conversation about model capabilities and the cohort-of-builders conversation about emotional resonance are about to stop being the same conversation.

The week's quietest pattern was the practice cluster, three writers in three different domains arguing that the constraint comes first and the work comes after. Mayo as starting point for the week's cooking, dance as input to creative thinking, first drafts as sand-shoveling. It is the right counter-frame to the speed narrative the AI pieces ran on, and worth holding both in the head at once.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Ben James on building londonunderground.live with AI for the most honest individual-builder dispatch of the month so far, Jacob Voytko on Spotify's twenty-four-hour iOS update for the cleanest platform-readiness piece, and Craig Kennedy's "Moscow's Fading Shadow Fleet" for the substantive policy report that will get cited later. Thin week, real signal.