Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

My timeline is full of “here’s how I got to $10k a month” posts. Last week, I even linked to one: a “Side Hustle CEO” bot whose creator said it had made him $1,800.

I’d like to formally apologize.

There are a lot of people trying to sell you an easy path to success.

They are full of shit.

I get the appeal. I’d love to answer two questions and have a business pop out. Instead, Side Hustle CEO gave me three terrible ideas and a reminder that I should try something before recommending it.

We live in an attention economy, but attention isn’t the same as success. My viral tweet got 98,000 views. It brought me three new followers and zero dollars.

The easy-money posts are great at getting attention. They tend to leave out the work: finding a real problem, making something useful, getting feedback, or trying again when it doesn’t land. A revenue screenshot doesn’t tell you how long it took, or what it cost to get there.

The work compounds. Better tools can help that work go further. They don’t make it optional.

Use AI to do the work. Don’t buy the promise that you can skip it.

To doing the work,
Jeremy

The neurons have pivoted to content: The Biological Computing Co.’s Mischief 1 turns still images into short videos using software shaped by experiments on living brain cells. It’s available on fal and OpenRouter from half a cent per generated second at 480p.

Your imaginary world has a sound department: Google’s Genie 4 creates interactive worlds you can explore and change with text while the scene keeps running, complete with sound and responsive dialogue. Think rough-drafting a movie scene or game world by stepping inside it.

Benchmaxxed or nah? Google says Gemini 4 Carbon can tackle days-long coding jobs and raises the bar on cybersecurity. There’s outside backing for the leaderboard hype: Artificial Analysis puts it first on its updated Intelligence Index at 59, though Claude Opus 5.5 still leads its coding-agent rankings. Access is still limited to selected users.

Max got promoted to Ultra: Claude’s Max 5x plan is now Max, and Max 20x is now Ultra, still $100 and $200 a month respectively. Verified Ultra accounts are losing the five-hour usage cap, starting with most existing subscribers. Read the announcement.

AI finally gets graded on adulting: OpenAI’s new LifeVal benchmark tests how well AI handles everyday chores, from finding childcare to navigating government services and planning a budget. It was shaped by a survey of nearly 4,000 people, and OpenAI says it has used the tests to improve its models over the past year.

Your coding agent has an expense account: Anthropic’s cost guide walks through spending limits, usage tracking and measuring what actually ships with Claude Code on Google Cloud. Compare the cost of completed work with the time and rework it saves, instead of treating a mountain of generated code as a productivity trophy.

Your agent needs a manager. Unfortunately, it’s you: Chase breaks down Lauren Tan’s pstack workflow: define what success looks like, make the agent show working software, and ask for test results instead of a confident farewell. A useful upgrade from “looks good to me,” especially when “me” is the bot that wrote it.

Marie Kondo, but for Claude’s emotional baggage: Natasha’s memory essay argues that stale plans, comments and handoff notes can confuse the next round of work. Her approach is to review that clutter after shipping and keep useful rules in the code and tests. The agent does not need a scrapbook of every thought it has ever had.

Binance would like to undo that withdrawal: Binance says a security breach affected roughly $6.3 billion and promises to cover all losses using its emergency fund and company money. Its preliminary investigation points to a compromised employee laptop; about $3 billion has been frozen on-chain. That is one very expensive incident review. Read the WSJ story.

Your coding assistant came with a plus-one: Cursor says a tampered Claude Code extension in its marketplace affected at most 5,000 users. The malicious version, not made by Anthropic, collected computer details and tried to install a persistent remote-access backdoor. Cursor removed it and took the attacker’s server offline, but warns that uninstalling alone may leave malicious files behind. A deeply unwanted bonus feature.

Claude’s new side hustle requires a lab coat: Anthropic’s drug-development update describes Claude helping six partner organizations with everything from drug designs to regulatory paperwork, alongside the company’s own research. Anthropic even acquired a one-person biotech whose founder used Claude to coordinate work across 11 outside labs.

Well, that escalated quickly: Exin Therapeutics’ co-founder says an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse. A licensed vet approved every irreversible step, and a human surgeon opened the skull. The team says the mouse recovered.

Your inside voice wants a Bluetooth connection: Subvocal is taking preorders for glasses designed to turn silently mouthed words into text. The startup says its prototypes can decode more than 200 words a minute by sensing tiny speech-muscle movements, letting you message or prompt an AI without talking out loud. Your coworkers may finally get some peace.

Have you tried turning its neurons off and on again? MIT researchers asked GPT-6 Astra to fix a small Qwen model that kept getting stuck repeating itself. By directly editing just 0.016% of its internal settings, called weights, it raised the model’s score on one math test from 7.9% to 48.1% without retraining.

The org chart is mostly Claude now: Spawn’s founder says the company has ten people and spent $3.1 million on tokens last month. His account describes permanent agents owning systems, rapid testing and feedback, and humans still making judgment calls.

Congratulations, you caused a traffic jam: OpenAI’s coding agents were generating so much activity that the system for storing and sharing code was struggling to keep up. So it built Pando, a new engine under the same familiar Git tools. OpenAI says it cut the median wait to upload code changes by nearly 80% and now serves almost a petabyte of code data a day. Hire a robot army, discover you also need to widen the driveway.

Your inner critic has terrible market research: Timeless advice from Derek Sivers to share the idea you keep dismissing as too obvious. You’ve spent so long inside your own head that your useful knowledge feels ordinary; somebody else may be hearing it for the first time. Put the work out and let people decide.