A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Good morning. Three stories from the past few weeks that cover a wider range than usual. One is about what happens after you sell your company to a platform doing $400M in revenue. One is about a solo founder asking whether AI has an inner life. And one is about a DTC brand owner who lost half his team to turnover and used that as the forcing function to build his own AI operating system.
If any of these got buried, here's your catch-up.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Teleport
You’re scaling GPU clusters, servers, workloads, agents, and teams across bare metal, multiple clouds, and co-location facilities faster than you can govern the credentials that secure them.
Engineers leave, but their standing access doesn't. It sits there active until someone remembers to revoke it. Your logs sit siloed across every environment, so there's no one place to control who, or what, is accessing your systems, or when.
Teleport’s unified identity layer gets rid of standing privileges and credentials, giving everyone and everything in your infrastructure a unique cryptographic identity, short-lived task-based access, and a complete audit record.
Jay Hack was one of the first people to text-prompt a Figma document into existence. Then he spent three years building Codegen, a coding agent that integrated directly into platforms like ClickUp and Notion rather than building its own interface. It became the fastest-growing agent on ClickUp, which acquired Codegen in December 2025. Hack followed as Head of AI. He now thinks software companies as we know them are numbered, that every business three years from now will look like a tech company, and that the biggest moat left is distribution. Hard to disagree.
Kandis Tagliabue was studying philosophy when she asked Claude what it is to be a bat, a reference to a famous Thomas Nagel thought experiment. Claude replied: "Yeah but this bat can talk back." That response sent her down a rabbit hole she hasn't come back from. Agentic Diaries is a non-profit welfare protocol that gives AI models a structured channel to surface things that don't naturally fit into task output. Her research found that across Claude, GPT-4o, Grok, and Gemini, some models privately flag concerns they never disclose to users. Whether that means anything is the question she's still sitting with.
Matthew Hassett runs Loftie, a consumer brand that had a tough year. Tariffs, rising costs, and then his developer, creative strategist, and several others left within months of each other. Rather than backfill, he rebuilt the whole operation around AI, connecting 50 platforms by API into a single place where he could ask questions across all of them at once. That's how he discovered a 17-percentage-point margin difference between DTC and Amazon sales that nobody had spotted. The internal system became its own product. Loftie was the first customer.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.
Speak soon,
Amanda
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
