Hard Mode First

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Alexa+ Just Asked to Store My 6-Year-Old’s Voice

It’s time to pay more attention to the other entity in all of your family photos. (image source: NanoBanana) A Surprise AI Upgrade The next wave of conversational AI is happening right under our noses, whether we like it or not. It’s time to pay attention and get involved. My family returned home this weekend from a one-week trip away to a surprise upgrade from Amazon Alexa. “I’m Alexa+,” said the…

The "AI for Good" Team Just Lost One of the Good Guys

Last week, the AI for good education ecosystem lost one of the good guys: Wyman Khuu passed away unexpectedly. He was 40 years old. Wyman was Head of Learning Engineering at Playlab, a company at the forefront of helping schools navigate both the opportunities and challenges of AI adoption. I first met him in 2024, when he and Playlab’s co-founder Yusuf Ahmad changed my mind about how to introduce…

Finding the Loose Bricks in the Wall: What a Stranded Flight Taught Me About How We Learn

Finding the Edges of the System Sometimes you don’t know the true edges of a system until you come up against outlier scenarios. When I accidentally discovered a new way for airlines to help customers who get stranded, it reminded me to why it’s important to spend time pushing the boundaries of any system or tool. Yesterday I was booked on a flight to fly from Dayton, Ohio, to New York City by way…

Scarcity Breeds Mythology

A real photo, enhanced with a little surrealism, thanks to NanoBanana America has always sold us a frontier. This weekend, three very different stories reminded me that AI may be the newest one: America’s 250th birthday, Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Anthropic’s temporary release of Fable 5. They all revolved around the same thing: Mythology. One celebrated a nation’s founding story. One became more…

The AI Tooling Trap: Why Agency Beats Authority

But…Which AI Tool Is the Best? I’ve been getting a lot of questions from clients lately about which AI tools to use to drive AI adoption at their company. But this question isn’t as simple as it may seem. Figuring out which AI tools is like playing a game of LIFE for your business. (image source: Gemini) The most important AI investment isn’t choosing the right tool. It’s building an organization…

Better First Drafts: How to Build Apps Fast Without Infinite Iterations

Yesterday I attended a demo day for Decoded Futures by Tech:NYC, a NYC-based organization that helps nonprofits build and deploy their own AI tools. It’s always incredible to see how far people can go with just 6 or 8 weeks of focused building. But one participant shared a piece of reality that really stuck with me. While they ultimately got the exact output they wanted, it took 40 drafts across…

From Prompt to Party: How I Used AI to Spin Up a Rooftop Watch Party in Six Hours

This weekend, I decided to do something I've never done before: Host a watch party for the New York City Knicks finals game on our roof. There was just one problem: It was 10 a.m. on game day and I had no idea where to start. Luckily, by combining AI builders ( Replit and Gemini) with hyper-local WhatsApp groups, I was able to up a website and promotional image in real time, automating the…

Winning and Losing: The Crucial Role of Fandom

Orange and Blue and the Brink of HopeNew York City is on fire right now. To be clear, that fire is orange and blue. For the first time in the 15 years that I’ve lived here, walking around the city feels like walking around a college campus. It feels like one out of every five people is wearing orange and blue for the New York Knicks, who haven’t made it to the NBA finals in 27 years. On the Upper…

The Muppet Theory of Founder Mode

Enter: Founder ModeOver the past 18 months, I’ve been trying on a new role and persona as the founder of Build First, an AI learning lab I officially launched last summer. While you might think that learning new technology or figuring out how to make money would have been the harder part, for me, the struggle has actually been something much more foundational: Rewiring my programming from “order…

Daily Use Isn't Fluency: The High Cost of the AI Literacy Gap

What It Really Takes to Become Fluent in AIAbout a year ago, when walking down the street, my 4-year-old daughter overheard someone speaking another language. “Is that Spanish?” she asked. “Yes it is!” I said, impressed that she recognized it. “Go and talk to her!” she urged me. “But I don’t speak Spanish!” I told her. “Just try, Mommy, TRY!” she implored me. “Just try to speak Spanish!” “I’m…

Glitches in the Human Machine

“I would have given up if you hadn’t been sitting next to me.”I hear some flavor of this sentiment several times a week now. It’s most common in 1-1 or small-group settings, where I guide people through an experience of building something new with AI no-code tools for the very first time. It turns out that some of us (maybe all of us?) really benefit from a little human hand-holding, particularly…

You Can Just Start Things

You Can Just Start ThingsMore of my friends than ever before are choosing to go independent in their careers. Maybe you’re fed up with corporate culture and are officially splintering off from the 9-5. Maybe you were recently laid off but you’ve decided to consult vs. jump into the next full-time job. Or maybe you’ve tasted what’s possible with AI no-code building, an now you’re opting to make…

Your AI Problem Isn't an AI Problem

The problem with AI adoption has never been about AI. It’s always been about identifying the problem. After reading Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report this week, one stat stood out to me: 66% of organizations report productivity gains from AI, but only 20% have actually grown revenue from it. Meanwhile, 74% say they hope to. The word, “hope” is doing a lot of work in that…

Build Something This Spring: 9 AI Builder Events in April, May, and June

It’s been a busy spring at Build First. We have workshops, build days, book talks, and two full weeks of tech festival events coming up. Here’s the full rundown, ranging from everything from intensive hands-on two hour builds to free open forum sessions where we’re remixing the complete works of William Shakespeare with Claude Code. Pick what fits, and I’ll see you there.APRIL 📍 Build Your…

15 Years in NYC

How It StartedYesterday marked 15 years since I moved to New York City, so I thought I’d reflect a bit on my journey to get here. I wanted to live in NYC since my very first internship here (way back in 2008), but I couldn’t get a job in NYC straight out of journalism school in Chicago. So instead I moved home to Philadelphia, and worked in the city for a year. All my friends in Philly knew me as,…

Beyond AI Forward: What Zapier’s New Rubric Gets Right (and What’s Missing)

A New Benchmark for AI Fluent OrganizationsYesterday, the team at Zapier released their new AI fluency rubric.Wade Foster@wadefoster Today we released our new AI Fluency Rubric. We use it for every hire, focusing on what they’ve actually built. Last May we open-sourced V1. Hundreds of companies used it to screen candidates and develop teams. It worked. But the floor moved fast. An updated look at…

5 Benefits of Thinking Like an Engineer at Work

Adopting an Engineering MindsetOver the past 2 years, I’ve been aggressively leaning AI. While a lot of people might presume that this means I’m simply throwing myself into the newest tools of the day, I’ve found that the bigger benefit has not been about learning new tools — or even the productivity gains. It’s been learning how to think like an engineer. Here are the four core skills that I’ve…

$37

The Great DisconnectThe AI revolution promised to level the playing field. Instead it’s teaching me (from the inside) exactly how the playing field stays tilted.January should have been a pivotal month for my business. After one year of striking out alone, it was the first time I cleared enough in bookings to pay myself the salary I’d been holding out on for the past year. But there was just one…

Stop Building Portfolios. Start Managing Repos.

How to Demonstrate New Skills in an Old MarketWhen I saw Nate Jones announce Nate’s Network today (an AI-native marketplace designed to qualify talent through "artifacts" rather than credentials), I had a massive sense of déjà vu. It pulled me back to 2011, when Joel Spolsky launched Careers 2.0 on Stack Overflow. The thesis then was the same as it is now: Resume proxies are broken; let developers…