Curb Your AI Enthusiasm

Hello, and happy Sunday! You might still be recovering from Thanksgiving dinner, but OpenAI is already counting down to Christmas—or, Shipmas. More on that, as well as everything we published this week (including a new content format) and the latest tech and business news, below. Also ICYMI, paid Every subscribers are invited to attend a workshop on December 10 by Sublime founder Sari Azout about building your knowledge library for creative work. Sign up to secure your spot.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“The Religion of Ramp” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: Boring business software doesn’t usually inspire devotion, but Ramp became one of the fastest-growing startups ever by preaching the most unsexy gospel in tech: helping companies spend less money. CEO Eric Glyman built a $7.6 billion expense management software company not by maximizing customer spending and growth hacks, but by turning "save time and money" into a corporate mantra that permeates every decision. Read this if you want to understand how mission-driven companies actually work. 📑 This is an Extendable Article—read it on our website to chat with the source material.

“Introducing Extendable Articles” by Dan Shipper: Great stories make you want to go deeper—to explore the interviews, dig into the research, and find the gems that didn't make the final cut. Now you can: We've built a new way to read that lets you chat directly with the source material behind the story. Extendable Articles unlock our research—interview transcripts, videos, and background reading—so you can dive into what interests you most. Read this to see how we're expanding what an article can be, and check out our first Extendable Article, Evan’s deep dive on Ramp. 

“AI Isn’t Your God—But It Might Be Your Intern” by Rhea Purohit/Learning Curve: We may all be guilty of expecting miracles with AI technology, but your chatbot is more like an enthusiastic intern than an omniscient being. Weaving together anecdotes—such as NASA's "plucky" Mars helicopter and the title character of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels—and technical lore like the Turing Test and Chinese room argument, Rhea explains why we keep overestimating AI's abilities while underestimating how much guidance it needs. Read this if you want to stop feeling disappointed by AI tools and start getting the most out of them. 

🎧 “Do 60-Minute Coding Tasks in 60 Seconds—With AI” by Dan Shipper/AI & I: Remember when building an app with AI took an hour? Those were the dark ages of…January. In this episode of AI & I, Steve Krouse, founder of developer cloud platform Val Town, demos Townie, an AI assistant that can build functional apps in less than a minute. Steve shares his take on why Val Town is focusing on being the backend infrastructure that sophisticated developers need, rather than chasing the no-code AI hype. Watch this for a live demo of building disposable software, fast, and to explore where developer tools are headed next. 🎧🖥 Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🔏 "Build a Six-Figure Side Hustle in One Weekend Using AI" by Rhea Purohit/AI & I: Claire Vo launched ChatPRD—now used by more than 20,000 product managers—during a single holiday weekend while her kids watched Disney movies. As a chief product officer, she proves you don't need to quit your day job to build something big. In the screenshares from this episode of AI & I, Claire demos how she uses AI to write product specs in real time, shares her exact tech stack, and shows how she turned user feedback into a product roadmap. Read this for a practical lesson in building an AI business that works around your life, not the other way around.—Aleena Vigoda