Tools, People, and Foundational Texts

Sam Hogg's essay on firsthand field research and tacit knowledge as complements to AI-generated analysis.

Why saved: Useful for designing research workflows that test model-generated reports against direct observation and primary sources.

Author of Forward Deployed Vagabond, an essay on field research, human motives, and tacit knowledge in the AI era.

Why saved: A public writing reference for incorporating firsthand human observations into AI-assisted research.

A Ness Labs essay on liminality as the in-between state where old categories break down and new identities, ideas, and ways of operating are formed.

Why saved: Useful for framing the pre-AI to post-AI transition as a threshold period where operating skill comes from acting inside uncertainty rather than waiting for the new order to stabilize.

Stripe's wallet and approval layer for agent payments, giving AI systems a way to request purchases without receiving raw card credentials.

Why saved: Worth tracking as a practical payment rail for the agency era, where agents need scoped spending power and humans still need a clean approval surface.

A Stripe Economics research post arguing that AI is helping nonemployer businesses reach higher revenue levels by filling capability gaps that once required hiring.

Why saved: Useful as a concrete data point for the Agency Era thesis that cheap intelligence expands what one person can build before adding headcount.

A Contrary Research series that maps deep-tech fields from first principles to the current frontier, with especially useful context on energy, compute, robotics, and industrial systems.

Why saved: Useful as a broad source shelf for the industrial side of the AI buildout, where energy, manufacturing, robotics, chips, and infrastructure all matter more than software abstraction alone.

A policy playbook collecting concrete US techno-industrial proposals across energy, defense, compute, critical minerals, and industrial capacity.

Why saved: Useful as a direct map of how the American industrial-policy coalition wants to shape compute, energy, manufacturing, and defense capacity at the federal level.

A free, opinionated directory of tools, references, and utilities for web-focused design engineers who move between product design and shipping code.

Why saved: Useful as a broad map of the modern design-engineer stack: inspiration, AI code tools, components, motion, 3D, capture, and the practical utilities people in this role actually use.

A Ribbonfarm essay series that turns The Office into a durable framework for reading hierarchy, power, and pathological behavior inside organizations.

Why saved: Useful as a compact operating lens for office politics, status games, and how real organizations distribute power beneath the official org chart.

A gateway and runtime that lets coding agents reach many tools through one execute surface instead of loading every schema into context.

Why saved: Useful as agent infrastructure when tool sprawl becomes the bottleneck: one entrypoint, lower context overhead, safer execution gating, and a cleaner path to multi-system workflows.

A practical primer on electricity markets and power economics that frames energy, not just chips, as the binding constraint on AI infrastructure growth.

Why saved: Useful as a clean starting point for the AI x energy thesis: if intelligence scales into physical bottlenecks, power markets, plant economics, and grid constraints become capital allocation questions.

A voice AI platform for real-time text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice cloning, and agent-ready audio workflows.

Why saved: Worth tracking as part of the voice layer in AI-native products, especially where price pressure, emotion control, and agent-callable audio infrastructure are changing what good enough sounds like.

Replit's AI design environment for turning product, site, and marketing ideas into on-brand visual output inside the same stack used to build and ship.

Why saved: Worth monitoring as a design-to-build workflow that compresses mockup, brand system, and implementation into one environment instead of a separate handoff chain.

A flight search and booking product focused on low fares, quick rebooking, check-in, and post-book travel operations.

Why saved: Useful as a practical travel-ops tool when the job is finding cheaper flights and reducing booking friction, not researching a general AI product category.

A Slack-native company AI coworker that answers questions, prepares briefings, and acts across shared business context and connected tools.

Why saved: Worth monitoring as a Slack-first approach to company-wide AI, especially where the distribution advantage is broad internal adoption rather than per-seat specialist usage.

A multiplayer company AI platform for shared agents, team workspaces, knowledge retrieval, workflows, and model-flexible operational tooling.

Why saved: Useful as a reference for company-context agent systems where multiple teams need shared knowledge, shared agents, and operational workflows beyond a single personal assistant.

An AI short-form growth platform for generating, remixing, scheduling, and scaling TikTok, Reels, and Shorts content.

Why saved: Useful to monitor as a high-volume distribution layer for AI-native growth systems where short-form output and iteration speed matter.

An agent-native tool marketplace and runtime that lets agents discover and call many third-party APIs through one integration.

Why saved: Useful as infrastructure for agentic research and operations when breadth of tool access matters more than owning each direct integration.

An enterprise control plane for governing agents, MCP servers, skills, permissions, security policy, and spend across AI clients and workflows.

Why saved: Useful as infrastructure for the governance layer under agent sprawl: identity, permissions, tool control, observability, and enterprise-safe deployment patterns.

An AI publishing and editorial workflow platform built for professional journalism, communications, and high-stakes content teams.

Why saved: Worth watching as a more structured editorial AI system for teams that need research, drafting, style control, and production workflows beyond generic chat.

A USV thesis post arguing that value in agentic AI will accrue across a composable stack of tools, memory, routing, identity, and orchestration rather than only inside vertically integrated model labs.

Why saved: Useful as a clean counter-thesis to fat-model concentration and a practical map of where value may build around agents, infrastructure layers, and composable AI systems.

A personal AI assistant designed to learn a user's working patterns and handle email, scheduling, follow-ups, and other busywork across tools.

Why saved: Relevant as a cloud-native executive-assistant product category: proactive, identity-bearing, and built around ongoing operating context instead of one-off chat.

A Palladium essay arguing that robotic and dual-use AI warfare shifts coercive capacity from human labor toward private capital, changing the political economics of force.

Why saved: Useful as a compact lens on how autonomy, defense tech, and corporate infrastructure can rewire the social contract when states rely less on citizens' bodies and more on private systems.

A curated index of influential memos, essays, white papers, decks, and reports framed around documents that redirected capital and attention.

Why saved: Useful when research needs a tighter narrative layer around important documents: what they argued, why they mattered, and how they changed markets or capital flows.

An AI video and podcast editor built around transcript-based editing, cleanup, captions, and repurposing workflows.

Why saved: Useful for operators and creators who want faster talking-head video, podcast, and demo production without living inside a traditional timeline editor.

A free archive of historic business, technology, leadership, and investment memos with direct access to primary-source documents.

Why saved: Useful as a fast primary-source archive when research starts with the original memo, paper, or letter rather than someone else's summary.

An all-in-one product engineering platform for analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, and error tracking.

Why saved: Relevant when one team wants a tighter loop between product instrumentation, experimentation, and shipping without stitching together multiple point tools.

Anthropic's guide to designing, testing, iterating, distributing, and troubleshooting Claude skills.

Why saved: A foundational reference for turning rough workflows into reusable agent instructions and evaluating whether skills are scoped well.

A polished macOS screenshot and screen-recording app with annotation, recording, and shareable CleanShot Cloud links.

Why saved: Useful for fast visual communication: product feedback, bug reports, async updates, tutorials, and annotated screenshots.

An open-model project and distributed inference network offering chat, downloadable models, synthetic data generation, and a GPU-node network.

Why saved: Worth monitoring as part of open-model experimentation, AI x crypto infrastructure, and decentralized inference.

An AI-assisted creator research and writing studio for studying high-performing posts and turning patterns into drafts in a trained voice.

Why saved: Relevant to AI-native content systems: research winning formats, extract structure, and produce platform-specific drafts without starting from a blank page.

A GitHub starter kit of Claude Code skills for GTM workflows including prospect research, ICP scoring, outreach, meeting prep, and pipeline digests.

Why saved: A useful example of turning GTM work into reusable agent skills instead of one-off prompting.

Newsletter growth and monetization operator focused on email economics, paid acquisition, and profitable scaling.

Why saved: Useful to follow when thinking about newsletter unit economics, subscriber monetization, and making paid acquisition work through better revenue per lead.

A collaboration platform and marketplace for machine learning models, datasets, demos, inference endpoints, papers, and open-source ML libraries.

Why saved: A default reference point for model discovery, open-source AI research, demos, datasets, licenses, and community adoption signals.

Public profile saved as a venture capital marketing and positioning signal.

Why saved: Worth monitoring for venture capital marketing, fund/content strategy, positioning, and go-to-market lessons relevant to investor/operator audiences.

A unified API and marketplace for accessing many LLMs through one OpenAI-compatible interface with routing, fallback, pricing, rankings, and policy controls.

Why saved: Relevant infrastructure for AI app development, model comparison, provider fallback, and cost/performance experimentation.

An AI short-form video research and scriptwriting platform for analyzing high-performing TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts content.

Why saved: Useful for systematizing short-form video research: finding outliers, understanding why they worked, and converting patterns into scripts.

A polished macOS screen recorder and editor for creating professional product demos, tutorials, courses, team updates, and social videos.

Why saved: Useful for turning product walkthroughs, UI demos, and AI workflow examples into higher-quality public artifacts without a heavy editing process.

An agent-skills directory and leaderboard tracking reusable skills across ecosystems including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, and others.

Why saved: Useful for watching how reusable agent workflows are being packaged, shared, and ranked across coding-agent ecosystems.

A curated reference library of UI components and examples drawn from real design systems.

Why saved: Useful when specifying product interfaces and comparing how mature design systems handle common components.