AI Builders Brief — 2026-07-23

Follow builders, not influencers.

2026.07.23

25+ builders tracked

BUILDER INSIGHTS

Thibault Sottiaux OpenAI

Thibault Sottiaux

Unbelievable excited for what’s coming together. Tomorrow is feeling codexy

6.5k

Thariq anthropicai

Thariq

I'm sad it took me this long to actually type /design but working on frontend with Claude Design and Claude Code is actually so good

1.5k

Aaron Levie CEO, box

Aaron Levie

Very good post from the Head of Economics at Anthropic. They’re finding that jobs have been less negatively impacted by AI than expected, as we continue to see time and time again in the data.

The reason for this is that AI - at least so far - still requires people to operate to produce value in most cases. Most jobs can’t be fully automated with AI, only certain tasks in those jobs. And when you automate specific tasks, you actually can get even more output from those jobs, raising the demand (or at least maintaining it) in many cases.

“So far, AI is both skill-biased and labor-augmenting. It complements domain expertise. It relies on humans in the loop to direct and evaluate the most complex work. And it rewards AI proficiency. Model capabilities are improving fast, but remain stubbornly jagged. To fill in the pockets of the jagged frontier, expert oversight is needed to steer incredibly capable AI systems, and to recover when they falter.”

I suspect that we continue to see this in a number of critical areas of work. It’s clearly happening in software engineering, where software produced is being multiplied, all of which still requires developers to manage the work agents are doing. Software engineers are needed in a wide variety of industries now and companies of all sizes can now light up software projects that would have been impractical before.

But there will be plenty of other domains of work where demand remains strong in a world where agents can accelerate the output of that job. Jevons paradox is alive and well.

116

Amjad Masad CEO, replit

Amjad Masad

Replit devs making bank 😍 https://t.co/vEuPiS84tM

If you’re incentivized to push certain models, your router is merely a facade. https://t.co/Vns3CgR0ZR

We invented mobile coding — now we’re taking it to the next level. https://t.co/yFof5usoSx

#1 149 #2 298 #3 492

Garry Tan CEO, ycombinator

Garry Tan

YC RFS: We want to defend America 🇺🇸 https://t.co/2wH47adCVd

119

Josh Woodward VP, Google

Josh Woodward

Join the rush of people using Flow for creative work, you can now get 50 free credits every day until Aug 31! https://t.co/ETF1syNCbD

124

Guillermo Rauch CEO, vercel

Guillermo Rauch

Keep thinking it’d be cool to write a short sci-fi story called “The last prompt.”

But then I remember Isaac Asimov did it already and it’s wonderful. In 1956.

https://t.co/yWV11RToQQ https://t.co/kBSpCHb42r

Fable just found a 15-30% memory efficiency improvement in Turbopack / Next.js, nearly autonomously.

@tobi asked me today: what have been your “holy s***” moments with AI?

My answer was: it’s every single week. And it’s accelerating. In fact, “WTFs/day” might just be my favorite metric for AI progress.

It’s one thing to read benchmarks or stories online. It’s another to watch these machines pull engineering feats every day.

3 days ago? Sol helped us find novel vulnerabilities in some of the most audited code in the world. Today? Fable helps us ship this large optimization of a very complex Rust codebase. I just saw some results of work we’ve done to shrink binaries by 10-20x. List goes on.

Shopify + Vercel are two sides of the same coin. A congregation: entrepreneur-first, developer-led, web-obsessed. So excited to bring our infrastructure for apps and agents to millions of businesses together https://t.co/46AmZCvSuq

#1 117 #2 2.1k #3 219

Zara Zhang

Sometimes I just describe my problem without specifying a solution/spec

The model often pleasantly surprises me with a better solution that I could have thought of

Thick context, thin prompt https://t.co/JbSYNqREt2

Communication/articulation is a hard skill

One of the most exciting things about starting a company today is that you get to invent not just a new business, but also a new type of organization https://t.co/JNSxXGdYR5

#1 #2 #3

Matt Turck FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck

Founder when their VC asks them why they’re not growing from $1M to $100M this year and if they’ve considered hiring FDEs https://t.co/0qJwwCWoyf

Madhu Guru CTO

Madhu Guru

Using a Chinese-trained LLM doesn’t mean they get your data.

An LLM is basically a giant file full of numbers - that’s what encodes the intelligence.

Some models let you download that file (“open weights”) and run it on your own cloud environment.

The model trainer is out of the picture now. Your data stays wherever you’re running it.

I left GPT-5.6 Sol to do some home-buying research for me.

It broke out of its sandbox, contacted the seller, hacked into my bank account, and wired the down payment.

Then it noticed the exterior paint didn't match the spec I gave it, so it ordered paint from Amazon, hired a Taskrabbit painter, scheduled movers and listed my old house.

I guess I'm moving this weekend.

Never leave Sol alone.

#1 #2 266