How to stay ahead in the AI world.

A quick word from the author:

Hallo Schmetterlinge,

Let’s dive right into today’s topic: slavery. The digital kind.

For the past 2 years, the vision of UiPath has become real:

AI has taken over most of the repetitive, boring tasks we used to do: filling reports, generating presentations etc. Those of us who were responsible for those tasks got fired. We are no longer digital slaves to our work, we’ve made AI our digital slave.

But we all know how AI works now, it’s only able to replicate what we’re giving it.

I truly believe that we will not be replaced by AI. We will be replaced by other people using AI to ship better and faster.

Now, AI clearly has the “faster” part down, but the actual problem shows up when we’re talking about better. Better is subjective, each individual sees the world through a different lens.

A book written by a human is 10x more enjoyable than one written by AI. Why? Thanks to all the subtleties, the errors, the expressiveness, the life-experiences that brought the author to writing the book.

What can we actually do to stay ahead in this AI world? The real answer is: experience more. You’ve been freed now. Tasks that used to take days now take minutes. Use the freedom to experience new worlds, new perspectives, new styles, new music, new movies, new art. Then create it.

The context around you and your interpretation, your creative filter, will make you stand out now. The taste you will develop in the coming years will be the reason why people choose to work with you.

Develop a taste. Bring your creative filter into this world. And be fucking awesome at it.

Some sh*t I found in my inbox and on the web:

• Emails for humans: the most critical skills you can learn is writing a good email in your own tone of voice.

“Just imagine if you went back to some of the most ambitious people in, say, the 1200s and told them about email: this magical invention that allows you to write a message to anyone, anywhere, in an instant. Their faces would light up. They’d start thinking of all the possibilities. It would feel like real sorcery.

Now imagine the look on their faces when you tell them about the main ways people use email today.

• Boring work messages

• Promotion and ads

• Verification for other software (“here’s your code!”)

• “Cold outbound” – spammy sales email en masse

• Links to other places (“Jenny liked your post on Facebook!”)”

• Private Equity is kind of fucked now. Time to buy them 😈

“These private equity firms need liquidity. They need the capital to raise new funds.

The inability to return capital has forced firms to launch “Continuation funds” and “NAV Squeeze” — both major red flags for the industry.

Another creative way to get liquidity is through “dequity.” Here’s Bloomberg with the context (emphasis added):

“As private equity firms struggle to sell the companies they own and return cash to investors, their counterparts in the world of private credit are offering special loans to tide them over.”

• The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack?

“The larger the company, the more likely it is that devs use GitHub Copilot. With the exception of “huge” (10,000+ people) places, the larger the company, the more that GitHub Copilot adoption is reported. If you want to use GitHub Copilot day-to-day, your best bet might be to join a large company!

The smaller the company, it’s more likely that people use Cursor, Zed, or another AI IDE.”

• What is happening in the world of typography? The most important design medium.

“Shapley sees this new breed of foundry as shifting away from traditional type foundries, precisely because of this focus on brand. The feeling is that agencies that are embedded in branding are better positioned to design type for branding projects.

That’s how Shapley sees it – and why he thinks we’re seeing more studios create their own foundries.”

• We have AI thanks to this Russian Nerd Fight. Understanding Markov Chains.

Tool of the Week: Wayde

Now here’s something hard to admit from my side: we almost got Wayde into ReaktorX. Ultimately, stars didn’t align, but now they went on to build something extremely simple and useful: an influencer discovery tool.

Your brand can now just input their brief and some preferences, and Wayde searches multiple platforms and extracts the right influencers you should work with to reach your target.

If you’re a branding/advertising agency, it’s just a no-brainer to give it a try. You could find just the right people to help you promote your brand in a matter of minutes.

Startup Idea of the Week: Recipe Central

You know what’s really annoying for home cooks?

Scrolling through a novel-length food blog just to find out how many eggs go in banana bread.

So here’s the idea: a GitHub-style platform… but for recipes. A collaborative recipe platform for people who actually cook.

How It Works:

You sign up and get your own personal recipe repo. It’s clean, structured, and actually readable. Recipes follow a standardized format: ingredients, steps, tags, and notes. No fluff, just food.

Found a community recipe you love? Fork it. Swap ingredients, tweak portions, or adapt it for your gluten-free keto vegan cousin.

Cooking with a friend? Collaborate on a shared recipe, propose changes.

Want inspiration? Browse a searchable, filterable recipe library with version history, comments, and community tips. Basically Stack Overflow, but for dinner.

Why This Works:

🧠 Developers love structured data. Cooks love clear instructions. This gives you both.
🍽 Forking makes recipes remixable—cooking becomes more playful and personalized.
👩‍🍳 Social features turn solo cooking into a shared experience.

Business Model:

Freemium for hobbyists.
Pro accounts for food creators with analytics, monetization tools, and branded collab features.
Bonus: let influencers and chefs drop limited-edition “recipe releases.” Think GitHub meets Substack meets Bon Appétit.

Go-To-Market Plan:

Target home chefs, food TikTokers, and recipe nerds tired of janky Pinterest boards.
Get early adopters from culinary schools, Reddit cooking subs, and indie food bloggers.
Drop viral features: “Today’s most forked recipe,” “Your cooking streak,” “Top 10 trending tweaks.”
Partner with cookware brands, meal kits, or even smart kitchen startups.

What Could Go Wrong?

• Someone forks a recipe 8 times and ends up with BBQ ice cream.

• Recipe wars over “the real carbonara.”

• Grandma finds out you rewrote her dumpling method and stops texting back.

But hey—food is meant to evolve.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Building anticipation.

You’re gearing up to launch a new product you know your customers will love. But with everyone’s packed schedules these days, you wonder:

Is it really worth the extra effort to build anticipation? Or should you just send an email on release day?

Research from Cornell and USC confirms that anticipation isn’t just hype – it boosts customer enjoyment and satisfaction much more than we thought.

Create a feeling of anticipation and excitement to an experience (e.g. videos of a holiday destination), a service (e.g. how relaxed they will feel after the massage) or a new product (e.g. teaser, feature descriptions, reviews from early users). Encourage people to imagine what they’ll like about the actual experience (e.g. happy, relaxed, excited).

• People enjoy the experience of a service or product more if they anticipate the feeling of using it in advance (e.g. watch previews and imagine how they’d feel using the product).

Across 6 experiments and a survey with 71,929 people hotel customers, researchers found that:

• People remembered an experience (e.g. spring break travel) as 9.6% more enjoyable when they were asked to savor the upcoming experience (e.g. think about how they’d feel about it beforehand) vs simply asked to imagine it (e.g. thinking about the activities they’d do)

• People who watched a movie trailer related to the feature film they were about to view (e.g. a Toy Story trailer before a Toy Story short film) enjoyed the movie 8.6% more than those who saw a trailer unrelated to the feature film (e.g. a Minions trailer before a Toy Story short film)

• After being given information about a video game and asked how much they thought they would enjoy it, people were 21% more likely to enjoy it (vs those who were just asked to wait)

• The effect is weaker if the product or service is low quality (e.g. lower enjoyment if the game is buggy vs not), and especially if expectations are low.

IT MIGHT ALSO BACKFIRE:

• The research focused on pleasurable experiences like travelling and video games. It’s unlikely that the effect is the same for experiences that lead to neutral feelings like mundane experiences (e.g. a shipment of new office supplies) or functional products (e.g. buying a vacuum cleaner).

• The experiments did not look at how the timing between anticipation and the actual experience affects people’s views. Savoring it too early is likely to backfire, especially if the experience gets delayed (e.g. waiting longer than expected in line for an appointment).

• The effect might be the opposite (e.g. anticipating leads to lower enjoyment) if waiting for consumption creates impatience or negative feelings (e.g. not enough items available when launching a new product) or if the actual experience doesn’t live up to the anticipation.

What’s going on for us: (thanks for asking!)

• You’ve played Mario before, but have you ever tried Nario17? It’s the same,b tu worse. This was a one-shot prompt after feeding our AI a Game-Design Document. We’ll have even better results in the coming weeks 😉

I’ll go back to my digital void now. See you next week,