I went looking for lost cities with Claude and free lidar data. A few hours and a few hundred dollars later: a mound cluster in Mexico and 9 possible ruins in Arizona with no public record I could find. Now the archaeologists get to judge. substack.com/home/post/p-219…

Codex driving Ancestry.com with browser use is absolutely amazing!! I've found entire areas of my family history I had no idea about...insane use case

METR again setting the standard in actually useful capability research.

turns out having land records in 3,000 separate (mostly paper) databases across the country is a feature, not a bug! news.risky.biz/risky-bulleti…

Ohio is having a moment

Skeptics on infra build out are wrong. Real enterprise businesses are finally converting tokens into $$. That flywheel is closing. Our token consumption is going up 100x in the next 12 months and yours will too.

More engineers ≠ faster MVP We analyzed the @verticalSaaS portfolio. Companies that hired 5+ engineers took ~8 months to ship. Lean teams (0-2 engineers) took ~7 months. The correlation between team size and speed? Nearly zero. Your CTO becomes a manager instead of your best coder. Every additional engineer adds communication overhead. Diminishing returns hit hard after 2 hires. The sweet spot: 2-3 senior engineers who ship fast, then scale once customers validate. Have you seen lean teams outpace larger ones?

Hard to imagine anyone manually updating systems or reading through documents line by line in 24 months. The work has to move up the stack

10 years ago, we built Qualia from our first customer’s basement. I actually lived there for a few months. Recent grads with zero title experience, learning the business by watching paralegals work all hours. The best products aren't built for customers, they're built with them. That still holds true today.

We’re launching Qualia Clear—our best and most ambitious product ever. Earlier this year, Claude Code and the other CLI tools clarified the path for systems of record like @qualiasoftware .  They showed that in a constrained domain it is possible to build a general purpose tool that brings work up an abstraction layer.  The CLI tools are in no way perfect, but the direction of travel is obvious. In 24 months, it’s hard for me to imagine that title companies or any professional in any field is routinely entering data, modifying documents, or communicating on individual repetitive emails.  The work is going to move up an abstraction layer or two.  UI is going to have a lot less value.  This is the path towards full automation. David Yuan and others have written extensively about the transition that needs to happen for platforms like Qualia from a system of record, to systems of action.  It’s been difficult for everyone to understand the change in user experience that must take place.  Shifting the user from being the sole worker navigating entering data and modifying documents to supervising and working with AI that wants to be proactive is difficult.  It requires a completely new approach. The models are also only recently getting good enough to work in a domain with non engineer users where accuracy is extremely important.  The form factor demonstrated by the CLI tools is correct and will be everywhere soon.  I’ve started 150 vertical systems of record now through Fractal @verticalSaaS and am seeing this opportunity take shape in many of those end markets. Qualia has spent the last decade building by far the best platform for closing real estate transactions.  Our ecosystem of products comprehensively covers the state space (what is going on in a transaction across all communication channels, systems, public records, etc.), the action space (what do you want to do), and we and our customers have comprehensive detail on industry practices that allow you to convert from the state space to an action you’d like to take. Qualia Clear is cutting edge technology.  It can be plugged in anywhere inside of Qualia or in your email where work is happening.  Because of the constrained focus of our vertical, Qualia Clear wakes up in the morning wanting to close real estate transactions.  It’s proactive in places, it’s driven by the user in places, and it’s always driving the decisions and escalations back to our expert users for verification. This is the beginning of a long journey for Qualia.  We’re all in.  The next 24 months are going to be the most interesting and transformative period ever in our industry. Reply in the comments if you want a demo, would like to work on the product, or want to talk vertical SaaS!  I’ll reach out.

"While safe and accurate deployment can be achieved with a human in the loop, this process only makes economic sense once an AI system is already resilient enough. You don't want to manually correct 20% of the time. In short, the dynamic that matter it is not a timeline of capacities but a timeline of accuracies." vintagedata.org/blog/posts/r…