Founder @rheosapp
England, United Kingdom
Joined February 2017
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Archie retweeted
yc deadline is tomorrow and im so fucking lazy i got @claudeai claude code to apply for me
i made the best tool for social media marketing called log and it just works
it listens replies dms and posts across loads of accounts on x reddit linkedin discord and facebook marketplace
its built on @subquadratic subq for the decisions @treg_ai for every api @twentycrm to store it all and @AdsPowerBrowser to sign into the accounts
i make it all open source cause i dont think you should pay money for things that should be free
the reason its free is i use it to make myself money and meet cool people
then i told it go for niche map and network max and find 32 people who can get me in
if it works im a genius if it doesnt i still have a cool video lol
log.listeningkit.com
I've read maybe ~10,000 YC applications. 8000 for YC admissions/PG quite a few years ago and anther 2000 informally as an alum.
There's a new and growing mistake and I want to share why it's more important than you think.
By the way - I try not to ever say YC admissions works this way or that way. That's YC's job and they're always changing things and making up their own minds.
But I will share my impression and you can see what you think - YC partners, please chime in as well if you like.
The YC application is fundamentally an evaluation of a founder's potential. And much less an evaluation of a specific business. (Airbedbreakfast transitioning into Airbnb because Brian, Nate, Joe never give up and never stop listening to their customers)
So, in your writing of the application, YOU need to shine through.
This batch, I read ~200 applications.
I'm guessing over half were significantly written, edited, or polished with AI.
That half was easily in the bottom half of my informal rankings, almost every time.
To be clear, most were NOT AI slop. I often couldn't tell at first they had used AI. Founders were pouring their heart and soul into their app - so I what I received was high quality.
But I think the AI really hurt them. Here's why:
Once polished by AI, I as reader lost insight into the personality of the writer.
I love the YC application because the questions are the same questions I would ask in office hours or casually to a friend that wanted help with their startup. It pushes the founder out of their pitchdeck/VC talk style into simple worded questions that can be answered simply as well. And great founders shine through when they just write like they talk. The LLM writing made answers feel more like a corporate cover letter, with the personality drained out.
The AI-assisted drafts also gave me a sense of mid work. The writing itself seemed like zero standard deviations from the mean. The LLMs had lopped off the outlier portions of sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. Given the YC App is an outlier detector, a writing tool that lops off outlier writing is the opposite of what you want.
And the AI writing was needlessly verbose. Which hurts when a reliable predictor of great founders is that they're deep thinkers and deep thinking shines through in the density of their writing.
So...
I did an experiment. I asked a bunch of these seemingly AI-assisted app writers to talk with me live. I just asked them the same YC app questions and recorded their answers.
I then gave them back the transcripts. Unedited and unpolished.
And...
OMG! A good number turned from easy no to actual good applications.
Magic! Remove AI >> Improve application.
This happened BOTH with native English speakers and founders abroad.
So this is my recommendation to all of you.
Don't let AI touch your application, even for a second.
And maybe try the dictation approach with a friend.
My apologies to the YC admissions team if you already knew AI-written applications were crap and you were using this insight to help you easily move applications to the No pile.
YC's Winter Batch Application deadline is Nov 2nd.
Archie retweeted
i'm autistic asf (diagnosed) about growth so i built an AI to find people just like me
it uses @treg_ai + @p0 read 1.52M posts and ignored everyone with a ring light and a course
out of all of it it handed me one random fella i'd never heard of @letsgodavis
here's how it works
Archie retweeted
The way people find information has fundamentally changed, and so has how customers find a business.
Inbound now runs through AI and search, social media and people. Every business is found differently.
See how your business is found in 2026: rheos.app/go/c261007-x-disco…
Archie retweeted
so I used @treg_ai to index 3 months of twitter posts from all of my followers from X found 300+ opportunities to find people who can help me make gtm opensource
but when this post went viral i didnt build the infra to handle it (big lol)
so here's how i fixed everything.
Archie retweeted
Nearly half of UK small businesses now use AI but only 1 in 5 feel 'very confident' using it day to day.
With a new Claude update every week, keeping up is a job in itself.
This week I explained Claude's new update to Projects to a group of business owners. I think it will significantly change how people use Claude to get real work done.
Instead of one long chat that gets messy, each piece of work gets its own space and everything stays organised in one place. Today it started opening up to Pro and Max users, and I've attached a one-minute video explainer below.
Small and medium businesses are the bedrock of the UK economy. All 5.7 million of them provide 60% of private sector jobs and half of all private sector turnover. But while big companies have AI strategies, budgets and teams to roll it out, most smaller businesses are working it out on their own and risk being left behind.
Those using AI say it saves them over half a day a week. That's time to work on the business, not in it. Giving them the push to give it a go, and explaining how things work in simple terms, is how we unlock the productivity our economy desperately needs.
The models can do almost anything. The human is the barrier, and education is the unlock.
For those who use Claude at work on Team or Enterprise plans in bigger organisations, it's coming to you next, so keep an eye out.
I've attached a slide showing how I set up a project for my sister, who's starting her university dissertation. It puts it in a more familiar context :)
Hope you find this useful!
Archie retweeted
yeah super interesting
ive only just set it up and it’s all very new to me.
big big gap in the market
forget saas and indie hackers and this x bubble, normal service based SMBs haven’t a clue either
marketing is a just a data game i feel. give models the right access and anyone can learn how to be a marketing engineer. that’s the key skill when the barrier to creation is completely lowered
Archie retweeted
Before a SaaS company spends its first ad dollar I want to see the signups table.
Is there a column for the click ID? fbclid, gclid, li_fat_id, msclkid, saved on the account row, because a cookie is long gone by the time someone pays.
No column, no ads yet.
Archie retweeted
paying for a dialer inside ghl costs $149 a month so i gave opus 5.5 half a day & built my own open source one on @twentycrm
OPUS IS SO OP!
powerdialer, contacts, scripts, caller stats, crm timeline
it's great to be unnerfed cheers @archieldroberts for the claude code max SUB
Archie retweeted
they haven't been silent, their new projects and artifacts system is their answer
giving sessions little avatars and a name doesn't make them any more useful, it makes it easier for ai dummies
claude artifacts provide the perfect surface to plan, think and spec through their comment system. I like seeing my spec, my docs, planning stuff out. then it can implement and work in the background through routines and subagents like dots or grokbot would
the new projects' 'coordinator' chat is the 'the chief of staff' that manages the 'employees' (threads/subagents)
it's just A2A
the real work requires speccing, thinking and planning through a human-agent interface, and anthropic have nailed it imo
iykyk
Archie retweeted
the frontier models can do it all if used correctly, and given the right data
they can reason for minutes, hours, see and iterate until the goal is met
that’s how they can produce these ai videos, because they now have the iterative feedback loop thinking combined with incredible multimodal reasoning
codex, claude code, dots, grokbot, muse and the models they run on are great, but there are some things they don’t have/do out of the box:
data access
domain expertise
systems thinking
taste
creativity
DISTRIBUTION
these are now the moats
all apps must be agent first and some will always need a surface (ui) for human intervention and judgement
marketing, branding, storytelling are the perfect example of this. in a world of ai marketing automation and slop, the storytellers and human led brands will win. simple
but the storytellers still need a system that plans and analyses to enable them to tell their story efficiently and compete
efficient marketing and storytelling is data driven
this logic can be applied generically to any business function.
every SMB will be using chatgpt, claude etc but do they have
a. the time, and
b. the knowledge
to actually drive growth and efficiency through repeatable systems? combined with data access
there’s only so much the harnesses can do for them, even with something like gpt dots
the education and data gap is still huge
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing:
AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
Archie retweeted
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing:
AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
Archie retweeted
just setup a project on claude, they’re new. they’re shared across all devices and accessible anywhere
they have a coordinator chat, then ‘threads’ on the that are just chats that fan out and either run in the cloud or locally
each chat can be sent instructions and read by the coordinator chat - nothing super new here or just used like normal. a2a messaging is standard behaviour for them.
you give the project access to repos, and/or local folders and it has it’s own library in the ui and it uses artifacts a lot more now - html than you can add comments to and chat with. Artifacts are easily the biggest unlock, can’t go without them. They are the new form of ‘local markdown vault/brain’
I give the local sessions a dev server, firebase emulator using a rig manager macos app i made, and firefox mcp so they often put screenshots of their work back into chat or said artifacts. Makes for a really useful feedback loop for QA and for speccing (rather than looking on dev server everytime it runs firefox headless)
Then Opus 5.5 just carries me through the work, it’s task creation and management is cracked, and it’s a lot easier to manage the chats because they are triaged
I use linear on the side for all the project management and issue tracking. And it’s code review feature is super useful because it allows me to review all the PRs and agent filled details/reports in their nice ui. Can add comments, sent to another cloud agent to review or back to claude to iterate.
This feels like the best way to vibe code rn and ive used terminals, buzz, codex, opencode, conductor, cursor, you name it.
hope this is useful
ALT project i use to invest, go in in the morning say wagwan and yeah send it off to research chat with financial data and grok tools
Archie retweeted
do we need to start making ads for models and people?
models are making ads ‘programmatically’ for humans
humans make ads for humans
models can now read platform content programmatically and visually (eg grok and muse), but this is different to how humans engage with content. requires a different type of taste
do we now need two separate ‘creative’ pillars, optimised for both?
Jevmaxxing for marketers
Jev can speed up most marketing workflows 30x and do it for < $3:
1/ Scan the whole Meta Ad Library
-> It reads every live ad in your category and tags each one by hook, format, offer and days running
2/ Find the ad patterns that survive
-> It compares formats by how many ads are still live after 60 days, so you know what lasts before you test it
3/ Score briefs before you shoot
-> Your LLM writes the briefs, Jev scores each on hook, brand fit and survival odds, and only the top ones get made
4/ Sort search terms
-> It asks "is this query from a buyer?" across the full Google Ads report, so negatives land the same night
5/ Catch fatigue early
-> For every ad with frequency up and CTR down, it picks replace, refresh or leave
6/ Check ad to landing page match
-> It scores whether the page delivers what the ad promised, the cheapest CVR fix in most accounts
7/ Score every lead
-> It rates each form fill 0 to 100 against your ideal customer within seconds, so Google and Meta learn to find more of the good ones
Available in the Ryze AI app and MCP/Claude Connector, link in the 1st comment 👇