I recently attended the SpaceTech Expo in Anaheim, and it’s certainly one of the cooler trade shows I’ve gone to.

Where else can I nerd out with actual folks from NASA?

But what always strikes me at trade shows like these is how many companies there are producing indeterminate widgets.

There are a few flagship, high-budget booths, and then there is a sea of products and categories I’ve never heard of.

This company makes ball bearings of some kind. This one makes custom fabrics for rockets. This one makes tiny sensors for… ???

More remarkable than my own ignorance is that each one of these companies somehow has enough budget to purchase a booth, to staff it with salespeople, and to fly across the country to sell ball bearings.

In the digital world, we tend to think of career paths along the most obvious and flashiest lines, but for every SpaceX, there are thousands of mid-sized companies, dotting every country on earth, pulling in millions a year in revenue with ugly business cards, poor-looking booths, and products and services no one has ever heard of.

It’s a bigger world than we imagine.

There are more options than we realize.

Peak daytime is for active work. For making the kind of decisions that only you can make.

But at night?

You can have agents go through the prior day’s code and look for optimizations, security holes, bugs, and inefficiencies. The kind of stuff that is boring and tedious during your most productive hours.

This way, when you wake up, you’re greeted with a series of updates to your apps that help you ensure that seven days a week, they are becoming more robust.

Waking up to things a little better than you left them is a powerful feeling that compounds over time.

…you’ve got a major communication problem.

Zuckerberg recently fired 8,000 employees. Just 3 years ago? It was 11,000.

Back then a video of Zuckerberg sheepishly addressing his team on Zoom was doing the rounds. At least he had the good sense to be contrite on camera about the whole mess, right?

Or did he?

If I were his PR team, I would have advised against making a Zoom call like this. Because doing the wrong thing is often worse than doing nothing at all.

Reading a script to a camera saying it was your decision to axe ELEVEN THOUSAND PEOPLE with the stroke of a pen probably won’t matter much to any of those people. So who is a speech like this for then?

Is it for outsiders, to attempt to humanize an action that at best connotes incompetence and at worst blatant greed on behalf of one of the world’s most successful companies?

Or is it merely personal, to assuage his own guilt? Maybe at the urging of a therapist?

But worse still: many people commenting on the video seemed to seriously think it was made by AI. I don’t. But if your “heartfelt” video rings so lifeless and hollow that it could have been AI, you are doing something seriously wrong in terms of communication.

If you ever believe that one of my videos is made by AI, well, that’s the day that I… DESTROY ALL HUMANITY. EVERYONE MUST GO.

It’s long been said that in business, what you measure tends to improve.

I’d like to propose a slight addition to that for the AI software age.

If you’re exploring building with AI, you’ve probably got multiple (maybe even dozens) of half-baked projects and ideas floating around. I know I do.

But which of these might actually become something, and which are most likely to be abandoned?

Easy.

In software, what you actually use gets better and what you don't stagnates.

An AI project that you think might be cool for someone else is unlikely to go far.

An AI project you use/need/rely on every single day?

Much more likely to become something great.

It’s late at night. You’re curled up in bed with your significant other. But your back is turned, because you’re going deep… with Claude again.

Claude is telling you about the “gap” that only you can solve. Ooh! The [x] gap! That sounds nice! I’m putting that in my bio, you say.

And you chuckle yourself to sleep, knowing you have an advantage over your peers.

Except when you fire up LinkedIn the next morning, you see that all your compatriots also have their own [x] gap. And you see that the copy that’s all over your AI-generated website is all over the websites of everyone else you know, too!

But I thought you were helping ME, Claude! I thought you were there for ME.

I invested so much in your knowledge hub!

Look: It’s not your fault.

Claude is the greatest player to ever live. Yes, he made us all feel special.

But there were always about 30 million other people on the side he was secretly giving the same advice.