💡7 bullet Sat: How I was exploited at my first startup, Fake vibe coding?, Boring

Joke: What's the difference between an AI and a consultant?

(Answer below ⬇️)

Fun: How I was exploited at my first startup. Very entertaining. As someone who has run startups, I felt for the author. My favorite red flag was when the co-founders offered to double his equity in return for him co-signing the company's bank loan!

Question: Are you vibe-coding or using Claude Code successfully? I tried again this week on a non-Greenfield project. Ran for 60 iterations, cost about £20, and produced useless output. Is there some secret to vibe-coding that you know? Please share.

Fake? In contrast, in “Building a personal AI factory” (https://www.john-rush.com/posts/ai-20250701.html) John Rush says that he is using Claude Code effectively with parallel git work trees. I’d like your experience on this.

Guide: Here’s a recent guide I wrote on how to add Google login to your Next.js project. The simplest way to add Google sign-in to your Next.js app ✍️

New: Gemini 3n released. Can run on mobile devices with performance around Gemini 1.5. Available here for free

Guide: Fine-tuning Gemma with Unsloth: Colab notebook from Unsloth for fine-tuning Gemma 3n

Classic: Choose Boring Technology. If you’re building for a business, the aim is to solve a problem for someone, not to build technology. This is easy to say, but hard to do if you like tech intrinsically.

This particularly applies to startups. Don’t kill your startup with complexity.

Extra: I narrated this newsletter here (Regent’s Park running track) using my new, super simple transcription approach. Will share next time!

Hope you’ve had a great week.

Tom 🙂

Joke: What's the difference between an AI and a consultant?

The AI will admit it's just making predictions based on past data 🎉