Erik’s Newsletter: High Agency, Taste, and AI Velocity

Issue #79

🗓 Today at a Glance

• Quote: "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

• Reading: AI Horseless Carriages

• Podcast: How to Become High Agency

• Tweet: Operate any business

• Product: Meta AI

• Idea: Engineer serendipity

Lately I’ve been noodling on how to make AI more of a partner and less of a tool. I kept circling one theme: how to compress feedback loops. Whether by handing English directly to AIs, collecting “hidden” cash-printing ideas, or scanning supermarket aisles with Yuka.

💬 Quote I’m Pondering

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." — Alan Kay

Still the cleanest way to frame agency. Less prediction, more building.

🧠 What I’m Thinking About

• Engineer Serendipity: Most luck is manufactured. Say yes more, change environments, collide with strangers.

• AI Collaboration: First drafts with AI, final drafts with humans. Let models stretch the canvas, then you paint.

• Digital Twin: I want a searchable, clickable version of my brain. Starting with transcripts. ErikGPT.

• Out-of-the-box Business Models: Ask, "What weird businesses are cash machines?" Then remix for your domain (example).

• Taste is a skill: curate 1000 exemplars, distill patterns, then create.

• AI Inversion: AI for ideation, coworkers for judgment; invert the usual sequence.

• Stop “should-ing” all over yourself: It signals borrowed goals.

• Software buying software: own a unique dataset, let the agent arbitrage it.

📚 What I’m Reading

• Horseless Carriages in Prompting — Koomen argues apps should expose their system prompts. Upside: expert users co-design behavior. Downside: onboarding drag for casuals. (link)

• Rick Rubin's Taste Gap — Everyone starts with better taste than skills. The work is closing the gap (link)

• Creativity’s 3 Constraints — Scarcity, speed, specificity force originality. China’s DeepSeek shows constraint-driven leapfrogging. (link)

• English as Input — AI turns natural language into the new API surface. Power: faster iteration and broader access. Risk: security and ambiguity creep.
  (link)

🧬 Something I Learned

• Mouth breathing correlates with higher cavity rates because it dries saliva, the mouth’s natural pH buffer. Small habit, big dental compounding.

• Smartphone sensors already out-resolve social media compression; future photo gains will come from AI up-sampling, not megapixels. Optics hit diminishing returns, algorithms haven’t.

• Yuka’s clean-label scores are pressuring brands to reformulate. Consumer-grade ML can move billion-dollar supply chains.

🎧 Podcasts Worth Your Time

• How to Become High Agency — You don’t need permission. Act like you own the place, then learn as you go (link)

• Palantir Engineers — Solve once, keep the IP, then resell; a SaaS spin on consulting economics. (link)

🔊 Tweets That Made Me Stop and Think

• How to Operate Any Business — 1) Delete before adding (applies to everything), 2) Make reversible decisions immediately, 3) Define terminology AND remove acronyms, 4) Always get feedback comes from customers who leave, 5) Re-prioritize work daily (link)

• Jakob’s Law in Design — Familiar beats clever. Use what people already know (link)

• Bezos on Meetings — Written memos > talking. Forces clarity (link)

• Speed Over Predictability — Fast is better than perfect. You can fix fast, you can’t fix slow (link)

• Design Detail Perception — Great designers see what others don’t (link)

🛠 Product I’m Loving

Meta AI — It's voice-first, and it works seamlessly with my Meta Ray-Bans. Nerdy as hell, but I love being hands-free. If Siri didn’t suck, I definitely wouldn't even need it.