Good writing has always been downstream of good thinking. The average language model can help you write faster—but can it help you think better?

Danny Aziz wrestled with this question while building the new version of Spiral, an AI writing partner informed by our editorial taste at Every that launched yesterday.

The result is a product—and a philosophy—built by the ultimate craftsman who believes you can lean into AI without blunting your edge with slop. We had Danny on AI & I to talk about using AI without losing your craft. We get into the hidden alpha in AI tools that slow you down, how to code with AI without losing your craft, and everything Danny learned about cajoling AI to write well.

You can try Spiral here: https://writewithspiral.com/

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Start

00:01:00 – Introduction

00:05:26 – How Danny used Spiral to prepare for this podcast

00:08:29 – Why slowing down makes AI writing better

00:13:42 – The agents working under the hood for Spiral

00:14:46 – How Spiral helps you explore the canvas of possibilities

00:24:41 – Why Danny pivoted away from the old version of Spiral

00:31:51 – How to use AI without losing your craft

00:34:55 – Danny’s workflow for building Spiral as a solo engineer

00:40:39 – Code with AI while staying in control

00:45:26 – What Danny learned about getting AI to write well

00:47:52 – How Danny used DSPy to give AI taste

00:56:16 – Dan v. AI Dan: Can the machine match the man?

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Danny Aziz: Danny Aziz (@DannyAziz97) / X
• Give Spiral a go: Spiral
• The article Every published about DSPy: I’ve Stopped Writing Prompts—DSPy Does It Better

This episode is a little different from our usual fare: It’s a conversation with our head of AI training Alex Duffy about Good Start Labs, a company he incubated inside Every. Today, Good Start Labs is spinning out of Every as a separate company with $3.6 million in funding from General Catalyst, Inovia, Every, and a group of angel investors from top-tier AI labs like DeepMind. We get into how Alex learned some of his biggest lessons about the real world from games, starting with RuneScape, which taught him how markets work and how not to get scammed. He explains why the static benchmarks we use to evaluate LLMs today are breaking down, and how games like Diplomacy offer a richer, more dynamic way to test and train large language models. Finally, Alex shares where he sees the most promise in AI—software, life sciences, and education—and why he believes games can make the models we use smarter, while helping people understand and use AI more effectively.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Start

00:01:48 - Introduction

00:04:14 - Why evals and benchmarks are broken

00:07:13 - The sneakiest LLMs in the market

00:13:00 - A competition that turns prompting into a sport

00:15:49 - Building a business around using games to make AI better

00:22:39 - Can language models learn how to be funny

00:25:31 - Why games are a great way to evaluate and train new models

00:26:58 - What child psychology tells us about games and AI

00:30:10 - Using games to unlock continual learning in AI

00:36:42 - Why Alex cares deeply about games

00:44:37 - Where Alex sees the most promise in AI

00:50:54 - Rethinking how young people start their careers in the age of AI

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Alex Duffy: alex duffy (@alxai_)
• Good Start Labs: https://goodstartlabs.com/, good start (@goodstartlabs)
• The book Alex is reading about the importance of games: Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World
• The book Dan recommends by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott: Playing and Reality

Aaron Levie is AI-pilled, but he’s one of the few CEOs who sees a future where AI agents work for us, instead of replacing us—helping us to do more than we could before.

Aaron’s been the CEO of Box for 20 years–long enough to see a few tech revolutions up close—and taking the company AI-first gave him a glimpse of what the next one means for us. We get into why jobs aren’t going away, the new shape of work, and what it takes to build an AI-first company from the inside.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe
• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Meet NotebookLM, the AI research tool and thinking partner that can analyze your sources, turn complexity into clarity and transform your content: https://notebooklm.google.com/

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Start

00:01:30 – Introduction

00:02:36 – Why AI won’t take your job

00:06:42 – Jevons Paradox and the future of work

00:10:40 – How Aaron’s experience with the cloud era shapes his view of AI

00:19:44 – Why every knowledge worker is becoming a manager of AI agents

00:25:21 – What Aaron’s learned from bringing AI into every corner of Box

00:33:57 – What’s overhyped in AI today

00:43:31 – How Aaron balances everyday execution with innovation

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Aaron Levie: Aaron Levie (@levie)
• Box: https://www.box.com/
• Dan’s essay on the shift toward the allocation economy: "The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy"
• Dwarkesh’s podcast with Richard Sutton: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/richard-sutton

If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it’s probably built wrong.You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can’t have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don’t know how to solve.

That’s why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. We get into MCP and the future of the AI-native internet.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share.

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

- Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

- Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Start

00:01:14 - Introduction

00:02:54 - Why Alex likes running barefoot

00:05:09 - APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet

00:10:53 - Why MCP servers are hard to get right

00:20:07 - Design principles for reliable MCP servers

00:23:50 - Scaling MCP servers for large APIs

00:25:14 - Using MCP for business ops at Stainless

00:28:12 - Building a company brain with Claude Code

00:33:59 - Where MCP goes from here

00:41:10 - Alex’s take on the security model for MCP

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

- Alex Rattray: Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex), Alex Rattray

- Stainless: https://www.stainless.com/

The future has a way of showing up early to some places. In software engineering, one of those places is Cognition—the startup that made headlines in early 2024 with Devin, the world’s first autonomous coding agent, and more recently with its acquisition of the AI code editor Windsurf.

Scott Wu, Cognition’s cofounder and CEO, has a front-row seat to what comes next. In this episode of AI & I, we talk with Wu about why the fundamentals of computer science still matter in an AI-first world, the direction he sees for the short- and long-term future of programming, and why he believes we may already be living with AGI.

Timestamps: 

00:00:00 – Start

00:02:02 – Introduction

00:02:32 – Why Scott thinks AGI is here

00:09:27 – Scott’s personal journey as a founder

00:16:55 – Why the fundamentals of computer science still matter

00:22:30 – How the future of programming will evolve

00:26:50 – A new workflow for the AI-first software engineer

00:29:33 – How Devin stacks up against Claude Code

00:40:05 – Reinforcement learning to build better coding agents

00:50:05 – What excites Scott about AI beyond Cognition

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Scott Wu: Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) 

• Learn more about Cognition: https://cognition.ai/ 

Try the world’s first autonomous coding agent: https://devin.ai/

Naveen Naidu built an app that found product-market fit backwards.Most apps launch first and then try to find users. Monologue, Naveen’s AI voice dictation app that came out of beta yesterday, did the opposite. It built a following of thousands of users during its incubation period at Every—many of them switching over from venture capital-backed competitors—all while the app barely had a landing page.The growth has continued in the 24 hours since launch, with an average of 1 million words being transcribed weekly, and in this episode of AI & I, we sit down with Naveen to talk about his journey as the single engineer behind a viral app. We get into the false starts and side projects that taught Naveen how to ship fast, the brutal feedback that kept Monologue honest, why Every decided to build in a crowded category, and the AI coding tools that let one developer do the work of a team.Get free early access to Amazon's Alexa Plus: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5?ref_=aucc_us_dis_everyalexa_q3_25Timestamps:00:01:27 – Introduction00:03:51 – A live demo of Monologue00:06:27 – Hard lessons from Naveen’s years in the wilderness00:12:29 – Building a muscle to ship fast00:21:11 – The spark that became Monologue00:26:09 – Dogfooding your way to a killer feature00:29:45 – Why the harshest product feedback is the most valuable00:31:47 – Every’s strategy for launching an app in a crowded space00:40:08 – Giving Monologue the Every “smell”00:45:09 – Naveen’s one-person AI stack to build beautiful appsIf you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!Want even more?Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperLinks to resources mentioned in the episode:https://www.monologue.to/

Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen.

He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone.

We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off. 

Dan and Noah get into:

• The nuts and bolts of the Claude Code-Obsidian setup: Noah set up Claude Code on top of his Obsidian root directory, and he walked me through how he uses it to prep for an upcoming speech—creating a project folder, pulling in relevant research from his notes, saving transcripts from chats with other LLMs, and generating daily progress updates.

• The “thinking partner” that lives inside Noah’s second brain: Noah points out that in the hype around AI’s ability to write, the fact that it can read is overlooked. That’s why he has an agent inside Claude Code with strict guardrails to stay in “thinking mode.” It logs his questions, tracks insights, and catches him up on research if he returns to a project after a few days away.

• How Noah does deep work on his phone: Noah rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian vault in it—and then runs Claude Code on top. Noah says that being able to think, write, research, and ship code from his phone has fundamentally changed the way he works.

This episode is a must-watch for anyone curious about who wants to learn how to use Claude Code to build a true second brain.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Start building in Google AI Studio at ai.dev.

Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at Framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house.

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps: 

00:01:19 - Introduction

00:04:28 - How you can do deep work on your phone

00:06:14 - Why Noah thinks Grok has the best voice AI

00:11:39 - The nuts and bolts of Noah’s Claude Code-Obsidian setup

00:23:59 - Using an agent in Claude Code as a “thinking partner”

00:35:07 - Noah’s Thomas’ English Muffin theory of AI

00:44:04 - The white space still left to explore in AI

00:50:41 - How Noah is preparing his kids for AI

01:01:54 - How he brought his Claude Code setup to mobile

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Noah Brier: https://www.noahbrier.com/, Noah Brier (@heyitsnoah) / X

• Alephic, his AI strategy consultancy: alephic.com 

• The conference he leads about marketing and AI: http://BRXND.AI 

• A newsletter he writes about AI: newsletter.brxnd.ai  

• The declassified relic from World War II they talk about: Simple Sabotage Field Manual 

• The apps Noah used to set up Claude Code on his phone: Termius, Tailscale

We had Dean Leitersdorf on the pod and he did something no guest had ever done.

Mid-sentence, he transformed from a startup founder in a black t-shirt to a wizard with light shooting from his hands. Then, he was in a white-walled game universe, and when he picked up the tissue box on his table, it morphed into a gun which he could shoot by moving his arm.

He did it with one of his products, Mirage: It takes any live video feed (like Dean on the pod) and instantly renders each frame into a new style of your choosing—40 milliseconds from input to output.

Dean is the co-founder and CEO of the creators of Decart which makes Mirage. They recently raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation to build a new era of real-time generative AI experiences like this.

Realtime generative video models are going to change video games forever, and Dean is on the forefront: imagine creating endless variations on existing titles, like GTA-V with a frigid winter filter, or taking a bare-bones vibe-coded prototype and using Mirage to texture it. 

But games are just the beginning, Dean sees Mirage as opening the door to a new medium, a new experience created by AI. 

In this episode, we take a look at how Mirage works under the hood, and what the Decart team learned about the future of software while wrestling with its toughest research problems. We also debate AGI—how close it really is, what counts as progress, and what kind of society it might create. This episode is a must watch for anyone interested in the future of gaming, creativity, or if you just want your mind blown by what’s already possible. 

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

• Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe 

• Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper 

Timestamps:

• Introduction: 00:00:47

• A demo of Mirage, the first real-time video-to-video model in the world: 00:02:38

• How Mirage can take your vibe-coded game to the next level: 00:06:22

• The new architecture of modern software: 00:08:45

• How Mirage works so blazingly fast: 00:16:34

• Inside Decart’s invention of a new “live stream diffusion” model: 00:20:33

• Solving the error accumulation problem for real-time video: 00:21:17

• How Dean thinks about inventing a new creative medium: 00:29:55

• Dean’s take on the post-AGI world: 00:39:43

• Why AI brings back the age of the generalist: 00:51:15
  

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Dean Leitersdorf: https://x.com/dleitersdorf?lang=en

• Decart: https://about.decart.ai/ 

• Try Mirage and Delulu: https://mirage.decart.ai/, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.decart.delulu, https://apps.apple.com/il/app/delulu-by-decart/id6749955738  

• More about Yan LeCun’s error accumulation problem: https://x.com/ylecun/status/1640123182983045120 

AGI is coming. Reid Hoffman just wrote the book on how to prepare.

According to Reid, every major tech breakthrough (the written word, the printing press, the telephone) triggered mass fear. But, contrary to our worries, new technology tends to enhance human agency—even more so, if you know how to use it well.

Reid is the cofounder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI; a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; an early backer and board member of OpenAI; and an award-winning podcaster

We spent an hour talking about how to develop a compass for navigating AGI. Here are a few takeaways:

Our sense of human agency is not just about external control but an internal stance—how we approach uncertainty & new tech is crucial

In new technology waves, NO blueprint or plan will have the right answers. Instead, adapting to new technology requires broad access, an experimental mindset, and flexibility

In an AGI world most jobs will transform, not disappear—and how you can prepare with hands-on trial and error

How certain social norms and ethics should change as AGI changes the landscape—like individual access to personal data

Why now may be finally be the era where quantified self tools become valuable
…and more, including everything in his new book Superagency, out this week.

It was a pleasure to have him on the show for a second time. This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to help build a more human future with AI.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every-2.kit.com/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt

It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: / danshipper

Sponsor:
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 — Episode Start

00:01:29 — Introduction

00:02:50 — Patterns in how we've historically adopted technology

00:07:02 — Why humans have typically been fearful of new technologies

00:13:25 — How Reid developed his own sense of agency

00:20:08 — The way Reid thinks about making investment decisions

00:22:00 — Attio: Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://attio.com/every⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM.

00:29:40 — AI as a "techno-humanist" compass

00:35:30 — How to prepare yourself for the way AI will change knowledge work

00:41:39 — Why equitable access to AI is important

00:45:15 — Reid's take on why private commons will be beneficial for society

00:47:23 — How AI is making Silicon Valley's conception of the "quantified self" a reality

00:52:14 — The shift from symbolic to sub-symbolic AI mirrors how we understand intelligence

01:03:29 — Reid's new book, Superagency

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Reid Hoffman: @reidhoffman
Superagency, Reid’s newest book: https://www.superagency.ai/

**Automate 80% of your repetitive writing, thinking, and creative tasks****Try Spiral made by Dan Shipper & Every: https://spiral.computer?utm_source=youtube**

Claire Vo built ChatPRD—an on-demand chief product officer powered by AI. It’s now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue.

The best part?

Claire has a demanding day job as the CPO at LaunchDarkly. So she built all of ChatPRD herself—over the weekend—with AI.

I sat down with Claire to talk about how ChatPRD works, how she built it as a side hustle using AI, and all of the ways she’s using AI tools to accelerate her work and life.

We get into:

- How she used AI to build ChatPRD over Thanksgiving break- The part of product management that Claire thinks AI will disrupt- Why the PMs of tomorrow will be “proto-managers” who create prototypes rather than just specs- How junior PMs can use AI to upskill faster- The ways in which ChatPRD is baked into her own workflow- How building ChatPRD is making Claire a better PM- How Claire uses AI as a tech-forward parent

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in turning their side hustle into a thriving business or who works in product.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Thanks to Google and LTX Studio for sponsoring this episode!

The Gemini 2.5 family of models is now generally available. 2.5 Pro, the most advanced model, is great for reasoning over complex tasks; next up, 2.5 Flash finds the sweet spot between performance and price; and finally, 2.5 Flash Lite is ideal for low-latency, high-volume tasks. Start building in Google AI Studio at ⁠https://ai.dev/⁠

LTX Studio is helping storytellers go from concept to delivery in one seamless platform. Whether you're storyboarding your next film, prototyping ad concepts, or creating pixel-ready assets, LTX Studio allows you to fully realize your imaginations. Check them out here: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2d5nx3ut⁠ Want even more?Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

- Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe

- Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

- Claire Vo: https://x.com/clairevo; @chiefproductofficer

- ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/; https://x.com/chatprd; https://www.linkedin.com/company/chatprd/; https://www.youtube.com/@ChatPRD

- Some of the AI tools that Claire used to build ChatPRD: http://Clerk.dev; https://tiptap.dev/

- Greeking Out, the Greek mythology podcast that Claire’s son enjoys: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/greeking-out