Week 24 · 2025-06-09 → 2025-06-15 · 14 newsletters

Vibes, Solar, and Self-Numbing

ai-as-craft-not-product · build-it-yourself-energy · aliveness-vs-numbness · small-signals

Fifteen emails across seven days, which is what a 2025 inbox actually looked like before the newsletter explosion fully landed. No dominant news story, no breaking macro thread. What did emerge was a quiet through-line about how independent writers were starting to relate to AI: less as a product to evaluate and more as a medium to work inside. Alongside it, a smaller cluster of pieces about choosing aliveness over numbness, and a handful of solo-builder dispatches that read like postcards from people who had stopped waiting for permission.

AI as Craft, Not Product

The most coherent thread of the week was a set of writers treating AI not as a thing to have opinions about but as a material they were already working with. Emily Manges at AI Residency wrote the cleanest version of this in "A meditation on vibe coding," reframing the practice as less about efficiency and more about developing intuition. Her line about treating software like sculpture, with the build process as its own kind of art form, is the framing the discourse was missing. She had moved from a simple React site to a full Swift MVP across roughly a thousand prompts, and the post is honest about the fact that she was not optimizing for shippability. She was optimizing for learning what the tool actually was.

Jacob Voytko at Client/Server approached the same question from the engineering side in "Go won't make error handling easier. Cursor says 'just press tab.'" Voytko's point was that the Go team's decision to stop pursuing syntactic changes for error handling was made in a world where LLM code generation has reduced the marginal cost of verbose syntax. The "just press tab" framing is a Cursor reality check on a decade of language design priorities. Whether or not you agree, the observation that syntactic sugar matters less when an LLM is filling it in for you is the kind of structural take that gets undercounted in the week-to-week noise.

Kerman Kohli ran Part 2 of "Scaling an AI Native Company" and introduced the Agent Job Description as a planning artifact. The four-question framing (outcome, context, liveliness/security/privacy, budget) is more useful than most of the agent-design content circulating at the time, mostly because it forces you to specify the agent's economics upfront. Mark Humphries at Generative History wrote the historian's version in "Steering a Middle Course on AI in the History Classroom," arguing against both surrender and outright rejection in favor of treating AI as evidence that exists in the world and has to be reckoned with. Justin Mares at The Next flagged the GPT body-fat-from-a-photo trick that was making rounds on Twitter, with the broader claim that AI-mediated visual diagnosis is going to bring back observational medicine in ways the scientific community is not yet ready for.

The take: in mid-2025 the writers worth following on AI were the ones using it daily as a practice, not the ones theorizing about it from a distance. Emily's vibe-coding piece and Voytko's Go piece are the same observation from opposite ends of the craft.

Build It Yourself Energy

The week's second cluster was solo-builder dispatches with the same affect: stop waiting, just make the thing. Ben James at Ben by Fax opened "We built a solar data center on a farm" with the line that captured it: "The internet is a reality printer. You input an idea, and it outputs talented people and real life stuff." A February tweet asking who wanted to build a proof-of-concept solar data center became a week on a California farm with twelve collaborators, twenty borrowed solar panels, three battery systems, Starlink, an RTX 4090, and a grow tent dissipating 700W of heat. The thing actually runs, is internet-connected, runs 24/7, and is hosting a notebook server, Llama, and Deepseek for whoever asks. The piece is short and entirely operational, which is the right register for it.

Max Mitcham ran the B2B equivalent in "How I Built a Social Revenue Attribution Machine That Tracks Every Like to Every Dollar." His complaint (that social attribution is a black hole between LinkedIn engagement and closed revenue) is the kind of thing most marketing teams complain about for years and never fix. He built it in less than a day. The post is half operational walkthrough, half manifesto about why most B2B teams are flying blind on the question of which posts actually drive revenue. Upen at MicroSaaS Idea ran his weekly roundup of $1K to $10K MRR builds (Yadaphone at $15K and 1,500 users in three months for browser-based cheap international calls, ScrapeGraphAI at $7.2K MRR for an AI scraping API, NativePHP hitting $100K in three months) which is the recurring snapshot of the long tail of solo SaaS that the venture press almost never covered at the time.

Jack Butcher at Visualize Value wrote the 200-word version of the same energy in "1%." The line that lands: "You only figure out what the 1% is in hindsight." Inputs are linear, outcomes are not, and the reframe is that you get better at the work either way. Jacob Voytko's second post of the week, advice for high schoolers who want to work in tech, sits in the same drawer: start now, build real things you can point to, dive all the way down the stack while you still have time.

The take: the people who were actually shipping in mid-2025 were doing it without a permission structure. The thread connecting the solar data center, the attribution machine, and the long tail of MicroSaaS builds is that the barrier to executing on a weird idea had dropped low enough that the only remaining question was whether you wanted to.

Aliveness vs Numbness

A smaller but unusually pointed cluster: two writers, same week, same argument from different angles. Piera Luisa Gelardi at Noomalooma wrote "How To Turn Your Summer Into a Love Affair With Being Alive" about a backyard BBQ where she had almost forfeited the day by being self-conscious about her bikini line, then chose otherwise: portobello burger, ice cream sandwich, one-song dance party with her daughter, and finally riding a zip line over and over in the dark, sailing through the warm air with mud squelching under her feet. The piece is about second chances to choose aliveness, and it is the better-written of the two because it is specific.

Winning Therapy at The Winner's Almanac wrote the harder version in "How to stay alive in a world trying to numb you." His argument: drinking, reels, Hinge, TV, and movies are all fun until your dopamine receptors fry and the underlying discontent starts bubbling up, at which point most people opt to up the ante rather than feel it. The phrase "the begging and pleading of your soul" is heavy-handed but the diagnosis is correct. Both pieces are about the same fork: lean into the feeling, or stack more stimulation on top of it.

The take: this is the kind of pairing the inbox throws up by accident, and it is worth noticing when it happens. Two writers with no overlapping audience landing on the same week with the same instinct (that the cost of distraction is the cost of not being present for your own life) is the kind of signal that means more than a hot-take cycle.

Small Signals

A few items that did not cluster but earned their slot.

Zach Everson at 1100 Pennsylvania returned to weekly cadence with reporting from his Forbes beat: the Trump Organization has filed to bring in at least 1,880 seasonal foreign workers since 2008 including 382 during the first term, with the requests climbing from 121 in 2021 to 178 in 2024, even as Trump publicly cites his "very aggressive policy on immigration" as a reason long-time workers are leaving. He paired it with the DTTM Operations trademark filing covering items from crypto wallet to virtual cologne, which is the kind of detail that reads like satire and is not.

grace at The Friday Brief covered the week's social-platform news: Reddit's report on conversational commerce, Meta launching generative AI video editing in the Edits app, YouTube testing vernacular thumbnails to pair with dubbed videos, and TikTok's new "Manage Topics" and "Smart Keyword Filter" giving users granular feed control. The platform-side story of mid-2025 was the slow rollout of AI-assisted creator tools across every major surface at once, and her brief was the cleanest weekly snapshot of it.

Internal Tech Emails ran an archive episode pulling an August 2007 Apple executive team agenda from the Epic v. Apple discovery and a February 2013 exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel about Thiel's board future after Thiel sold the majority of his Facebook stock. Not week-relevant but the kind of primary-source archaeology that holds up.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The AI conversation worth reading in mid-2025 was happening among practitioners, not pundits. Emily Manges on vibe coding, Voytko on what LLMs do to language design, Kerman on agent job descriptions, and Humphries on AI in the history classroom were all writing from inside the practice. The takes that aged best are the ones from people whose hands were already on the tool.

The independent builder energy of the week was the quiet story. A solar data center built by twelve strangers from a tweet, a social attribution system shipped in a day, a long tail of $2K to $15K MRR products being launched by solo founders. The thread is that execution costs collapsed at a moment when the venture-press narrative was still focused on incumbents.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Emily Manges on vibe coding for the cleanest frame on what working with AI as a medium actually feels like, Ben James on the solar data center for the most fun "we just built it" dispatch of the year so far, and Piera Gelardi's summer aliveness piece for the post most worth carrying into the season the week actually was.