Ten years ago I was the inexperienced 27-year-old chief of staff I now tell early-stage founders not to hire. There's a lot that hire can do. Sitting with the founder on the hardest calls isn't one of them.

In March I built a little tool with Claude Code to turn off notification sounds for every app on my Mac. Then I forgot it existed. Last month: "didn't we make a little CLI for notification settings at one point?" One morning later it had alert styles and an uninstaller. shhhhhh.sh (six h's, lol)

Added covers to my free-books page, because it turns out nobody knows what Absinthe & Flamethrowers is from the title alone.

My son demanded I figure out a Rubik's Cube. ~2 hours of YouTube, Claude, and stewing later, I went to bed extremely annoyed (at the toy, not him—either way, very stupid). I'd turned it into a reflection on my self-worth instead of just playing with it. Classic enneagram 3. 🙃

Austin people: you can skip shipping on the free books and just pick them up. Tick the ones you want on the page and I'll set them aside for you.

My rule as an advisor: I don't bullshit, and I don't create work. The second half is, surprisingly, harder, because a retainer quietly pays you to look busy. Sometimes doing less is the more responsible move.

this is so awesome

mr. TIM@timkellogg.me · 4d ago

a guy found a planet 117 light years away using Claude Code with Opus 5.5 & Fable NASA gave him telescope time to acquire better proof The agents used traditional astronomy tools for processing, search, transit fitting, and false positive checks www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/c...

Ask a founder who they call about the hardest decision on their mind. A board member, maybe. A friend, a coach, or Claude. Most often, nobody. And a friend (or Claude) will listen, but they only know your side of it.

Okay so the office clear-out left me with 185 books I'm not keeping. Everything from The Windup Girl to Who Moved My Cheese? (no judgment). They're free, you just cover media mail, and Austin friends can pick up. First come, first served.

completely distracted by and very much need to know more about what's going on with the person in red here

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 5d ago

Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama ... I can do whatever I want, if I want."

Most early-stage founders shouldn't hire a chief of staff. (I've been one twice.) They're usually trying to fill three jobs with one hire. Senior leaders for the team, an exec coach, and an objective thought partner for the hard calls. I've been the third one for 15+ years.

I don’t think I’d like to be at ACL for this weather but man it was a gorgeous day for a misty bike ride

New /now page is up! A little snapshot of what's on my mind: founders, Bartleby, vermouth, and a mountain of side projects. 😅 Also, the office clear-out left me with 185 books that need new homes, free if you cover shipping (or local pickup in Austin). alexpriest.com/now

Now — Alex Priest

What Alex is up to right now

alexpriest.com

I have a list of post ideas a mile long, and every one of them wants to be perfect before it goes out. Trying a different approach: fuck it, let's go.

Kids have already decided to decorate the new trash can—but actually they picked a pretty rad color scheme

I'm tinkering with an app that makes iMessage better on Mac—power-user tools, real archiving (not just delete), great keyboard shortcuts, etc. What's the one thing about Messages on Mac that drives you nuts?

Before the internet, you had a guy. A guy for your health, a guy for your money, a guy for your travel. Now you're the guy for all of it. Turns out those guys did a lot of work.

Used /fast a couple times today in Claude Code and... well that's fun. 🏎️

This was quite good—learned a ton about this messy situation Trump has put us in. Unfortunately, not inspiring. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/...

Remember like two weeks ago when we cared about saving context use

Has anyone else tried this with any success?

SXSW starts today and there are 4,000+ events on the schedule. I'm not even going and I'm overwhelmed. So I pointed Claude at this last week and... it built a quiz that spits out a personalized schedule in about a minute. --dangerously-skip-permissions ftw

SXSW starts in two days and there are 4,000+ sessions on the schedule. Every year the same thing happens... you open it, start scrolling, get overwhelmed, open 472 browser tabs, and end up with no plan. You're already exhausted and the fucking thing hasn't even started yet.

Just discovered that you can enable remote control for *all sessions* in Claude code... 👀

Very, very excited and proud to have voted for @jamestalarico.bsky.social today. And while I love @jasmineforus.bsky.social, too, I felt compelled to vote for the person I think has the best chance of turning Texas blue in November.

I’m reaching the point where I’m almost willing to pay apps to hide their useless AI features (and this comes from someone who, generally, is a big user + optimist about AI), smh

For five YEARS I have had two documents folders in my iCloud (“Documents” and “Documents 2”) and my files have been an utter disaster. Today I discovered Forklift and I’M FINALLY SAVED from this mess of my own creation. Incredible software, worth every penny. binarynights.com

I’ve officially reached “volume discount” level for my impulse buying of domain names

“One of sludge’s most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions… Once that skepticism sets in, it’s not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc…

This episode fucking wrecked me. Completely, utterly devastating. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/0…