Builders - Ben's Bites

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Builders

GPT-5.5 is a good model

Apr 28, 2026

Hey folks,

I spent most of last week in San Francisco, but mostly sat in my hotel obsessing over my Stanford talk while trying to work out where I’d find the specific colour presents my kids had requested. Arabella wanted purple. Max wanted green.

Jenni is the main reason I went to SF. She invited me to Stanford and it was such a privilege. Plus, she’s brilliant. Sharp, high-agency, but warm and very personable. She also runs an AI consultancy for CEOs and gets my highest recommendation. If you get the chance to work with her, take it.

SF has this energy - how do I go faster, grow bigger, become more successful?

I get it. I like that energy. But I also came home thinking that my own version of ambition looks a bit different.

Yesterday I finally read the profile of Lenny from Lenny’s Newsletter and a lot of it stuck with me. Because it was about building a life where you can care deeply about the work without letting the work eat everything else.

That felt so ‘me’ I had to text him and let him know!

I spent an unreasonable amount of time on my Stanford talk. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I cared about how it landed and was presented. And also because I was trying to make the course and the talk at the same time.

Working on it also made it clearer to me that I sit in this weird middle ground where non-technical people think I’m technical, and developers don’t. But I think a lot of you are somewhere in that messy middle too. Truth is, it’s all a bit messy - everyone is still figuring out agents and AI.

Working with agents isn’t about becoming a developer, but understanding the shape of things; files, tools, systems. With a thick dollop of taste on top.

If you can steer agents, you can get technical pretty quickly. I did. You just have to be realistic that you’ll hit tons of bumps in the road. Your job is to use your agent to figure it out - and you’ll probably learn something that’ll come up again and again.

That’s what I want Ben’s Bites to be more about. Taking you along my exploration: what I’m seeing, what I’m trying, how I’m thinking about it, what bumps I ran into, come along and try whatever sounds useful. Too much ‘education’ out there is just thirsty growth-hacks to sell you something.

I’ve sold a company. I’ve got three tiny kids at home. I want to do excellent work, make good money, back great companies, and build something useful without accidentally creating a job I don’t want.

There are big, valuable companies that want me to work with them. They’d give me clout, access, money. But I hesitate because I don’t know if I can give that kind of thing my all.

Even with my fund. I’m invested in funds who have more money, better process, bigger pipelines. And yet my funds are outperforming.

But I struggle to fundraise because my story isn’t presented cleanly and my process doesn’t look like a workflow. I tinker. I talk to developers. I try tools. I see what people click. I back founders building things I think will matter.

It’s all connected. The newsletter gives me a read on what builders care about. The fund lets me back the tools that might become important. The course/workshop stuff is me trying to teach the shift I’m living through myself.

Devtools built for developers today become the tools agents use. Humans steering, agents operating. They’ll pick up the tools, compose them, run the commands, change the files, connect the systems.

We just gotta understand enough of the shape of the work to direct it well.

A lot of what I do comes down to feel. Caring about the thing enough to make it good, but not needing to turn every good thing into a machine. And squeezing every last drop for growth’s sake.

So I came back from SF without a plan to scale. Mostly I came back thinking, I want to keep building for this new class of builders. People who are curious, increasingly technical, and trying to use AI to become more capable.

That feels like a good place to spend my time. Raising the floor, not the ceiling (h/t Jenni/Jen’s Bites).

Exploring, tinkering and teaching.

p.s. the kids got their toys, and I’ll continue working on the ‘course’ with care 😊

p.p.s. speaking of care, my brother Adam just launchedHono UI - a UI kit (like Shadcn) but for projects that use Hono. Proud of him! Do me a favour and blow up his launch post 🙏

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