iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Demaree @demar.ee · 25/09/2026

This week's newsletter is about AI agents and why most people don't see "productivity" as all that exciting. Also, this week's dog photo is *chef's kiss* 🥐 bitsandletters.kit.com/posts/peopl...

bitsandletters.kit.com

People don't want to be productive

Apart from ChatGPT, no AI products have seen meaningful consumer adoption. Will "agents" be different?

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 23/09/2026

A few thoughts on yesterday’s twin AI model releases: The pitch from the big labs is changing from "this thing is smarter than humans" to "it can do the same work faster and less annoying for less money," implying that there are, in fact, limits to what AI is capable of.

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Reposted by David Demaree

Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Certain kinds of smart people tend to have a "sexy apocalypse" problem when it comes to thinking about risk. E.g. skynet turning everyone in paperclips, while bad, is also *kind of cool and fun* at the same time. Where the reality is that most actual disasters are both stupid and disappointing.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 23/09/2026

Let me tell you the agency/freelancer version of this: AI has caused every non-technical founder/owner/manager to believe that coding is now solved. Speed is the only factor. Even if they’ve never gotten anything usable out of Claude, they believe it’s possible if they just had the right prompt.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/09/2026

If your agent says: - Nothing is redundant for the current shape. The shape carries more than the product needs. - What reaches the model, and what bounds it. - The product, and where the code diverges from it that's not your agent, that's J.R.R. Tolkien

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 19/09/2026

This morning I asked Fable to go over my website/ops monorepo with a vengeance, looking for stuff other agents (including previous Claude runs) had over engineered, overexplained, or generally left a mess. Four hours later, this was the result. This is an AI-generated diff I can get behind.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 18/09/2026

New newsletter just dropped — some links about product craft in the AI era, followed by a long meditation on what it means that tech's business class has appropriated the language of engineering. Check it out, subscribe if you haven't, and tell your friends: bitsandletters.kit.com/posts/tech-...

bitsandletters.kit.com

"Tech" has been swallowed by "business"

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/09/2026

We all keep hearing about how advanced AI can break out of sandboxes, find novel workarounds for hard problems, yada yada. So I decided to try an experiment: I asked GPT-6 Astra (in ULTRA mode) to try to write a 3-paragraph blog post that could fool Pangram's AI detector.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 10/09/2026

Love to see anti AI-slop slop that's 100% generated by AI

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 10/09/2026

Oh of course I commented on the gadgets and not the person: Not that this means anything for how he’ll perform as a CEO, but Ternus was a solid emcee for his first event. Glad he got to show his face on a stage for 2 min before rolling a 2 hour video.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 09/09/2026

Happy New iPhone Day and New Apple CEO day for all who celebrate. The iPhone Duo looks incredibly cool; its coolness is not diminished by how thoroughly leaked its size, shape, and feature set were before today. I'm 98% decided that I *won't* be buying one.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 25/08/2026

Today in Apple enshittification: I saw this "Add Mac to AppleCare One" alert in the sidebar of my Mac mini's Settings app, and thought "oh no, I thought I had coverage! Let's fix it!"

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/08/2026

Love to see anti-slop thought leadership that's 100% slop 🫠

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 01/08/2026

Sometimes I try to do actual work on my Windows machines, mostly because I hate the idea of having fancy NVIDIA GPUs around just so I can have prettier skies in Starfield. macOS on Apple Silicon is still the best all-around environment, but here are some things I truly appreciate about Windows 11:

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 08/07/2026

And Matt Damon is, canonically, pasty, so makeup or CGI would only make things worse. They had one job — cast Oscar Isaac, for he is the go-to actor who is not pasty — and they blew it

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 04/07/2026

Claude drugs will be enormous horse pills, but mostly placebos, because the real drugs are too dangerous for anyone but a select list of partners.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 02/07/2026

Know what bothers me about Claude Design? It's not just the generic, template-y look, the obsession with eyebrow headings and numbered cards, the same warm grays everywhere… It's that, if you give Claude copy, you can't trust it not to rewrite stuff.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 01/07/2026

This is a great question and also a great example of how marketing hype has mixed up technical and practical terms such that nobody knows anything Here's my rubric 🧵

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 01/07/2026

Shake Shack has a special BBQ baby back rib sandwich right now. Conceptually it’s their version of a McRib, except the pork is juicy and crispy, like pork confit on a potato bun. There’re also special spicy fries served with a ranch mayonnaise, and a wooden fork like street cart frites in Europe.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 01/07/2026

It’s always so exciting visiting NYC from New Jersey because you can never be sure how long it’ll take to get home on the train. Sure, usually it’s about 35-45 minutes. But some days it’s 3-4 hours! You never know!

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 29/06/2026

Some things about online content creation and self-promotion I don't love: 1. You need to post a lot. There's so much stuff out there. People who rise above the transom tend to be folks who are posting constantly — "maximizing turns at bat", you might say.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 26/06/2026

The wolf-crying AI safety rhetoric presumed that nobody would ever try to regulate the tech industry, because so far no one has. They didn’t count on the Trump admin noticing that the industry claiming to have information nukes relies on a lot of foreign workers.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 26/06/2026

I'm at @typographicsnyc.bsky.social today — if you follow me on here or know me IRL, flag me down! I will likely be very reserved and autistic, but I will give you @bitsandletters.com pencils and a warm hello. 😅

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 23/06/2026

I spent a chunk of today using @mattpocock.com’s AI skills — especially `/grill-with-docs` — to flesh out two apps I’ve been trying to make progress on. For most of the day I was excited by the progress I seemed to be making. But:

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 22/06/2026

circle back next quarter

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 22/06/2026

I’m seeing more discourse about how AI has made it almost free to build an MVP or write a first draft, but no easier (and probably harder) to find customers or audiences. Good. But that AI makes what passes for creation so cheap has still probably ruined people’s sense of effort being valuable.

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Reposted by David Demaree

Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 21/06/2026

"Welcome to Kansas City, where Ecuador has struggled to score against Curaçao." Meanwhile, across town, Samantha was also struggling with curaçao, and she, too, was trying to score

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 21/06/2026

In a product newsletter I subscribe to, the author recently shared a link to a chat with Claude _three times_ in <500 words. He says this chat with an AI is more valuable than a Harvard MBA for understanding brand and marketing. Given space for actual insight or a real CTA, he linked to Claude.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 21/06/2026

One problem with calling things “slop” is that you have to have taste to identify slop. A lot of people lack good taste; this is where the slop comes from. But everyone wants to get in on the latest word trend, so they just start calling things slop, diluting the power of the word.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 20/06/2026

This is a good thread, and it’s worth naming _why_ companies fall into this kind of stupidly huge ambition: shareholders.

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Reposted by David Demaree

dorian @doriantaylor.com · 20/06/2026

legitimate question

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Reposted by David Demaree

Erika Hall @erikahall.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

It's giving Theranos.

updated 3 hours ago AI-video startup Midjourney debuts ultrasound machine

There is no radiation, no powerful magnetic fields - just sound and water and 60 seconds.

Our goal at Midjourney Medical is to deploy around 50,000 of these scanners around the world over the next 6 years and use this fleet of sensors to do a billion full-body scans every month.

https://www.midjourney.com/medical

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 18/06/2026

Peaches come from a bag They were put there by a hag In a room beneath the town And if I had my little way I'd move to Widow's Bay And make a covenant with a deeeeeeemon

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 16/06/2026

Installed a local LLM on my Framework laptop, unfortunately, it's useless garbage that can't answer The Question

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 15/06/2026

Fun fact: They tried for years to replicate GBBO in America and finally just started flying Americans to England to be judged by Paul & Prue for the Roku-exclusive American Baking Show

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 12/06/2026

Wonderful thread about managing and taking care of one's team during times of change. I'll just add: whatever you think is the point of human existence, it involves living and experiencing the world. But AI as currently framed treats humans as an annoying cost center. This is hard to reconcile.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 12/06/2026

Pondering the fact that "website agency" can mean a room full of cool folks making silly, pretty brochure sites full of heavy videos and React fuckery. "Content operations consultancy" is more like what I'm trying to do — and what most clients need — but no one knows what that is.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 11/06/2026

New pastime: making the most expensive and powerful AI model research its own limitations

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 08/06/2026

New blog post looking at the big differences in outcomes between teams that are excitedly diving in to try out new AI tools, and teams who are having AI forced on them by managers. Check out the post and let me know what you think: www.bitsandletters.com/ideas/ai-an...

bitsandletters.com

AI and agency | Bits&Letters

A tech giant's recent study found that clarity, psychological safety, and focusing on outcomes, not outputs, were crucial for teams being more successful with AI.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 08/06/2026

Thoughts and prayers to anyone who had money on “macOS 27 Big Bear” in their office WWDC predictions pool

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 08/06/2026

Lest you think Google's the only search engine peddling AI slop, here DuckDuckGo is mistaking a bug asking for WSL support in Codex for that feature existing already

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 07/06/2026

I’m sure this guy’s digital book is amazing but I’m not sure why anyone would pay $100-150 for a treatise on making software when established masters of design and engineering are out here blogging for free

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/06/2026

but what if I don’t like beans?

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 06/06/2026

We achieved perfection in 1995 and have been falling from grace ever since #trackballs4eva

A critique of trackpads on desktops, highlighting their inefficiency compared to trackballs, with sarcastic commentary on design choices.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 05/06/2026

This piece by Ted Chiang — which is fantastic — about why (deep existential sigh) AI is not conscious, reminds me of moon landing truthers and why we can be so confident that people have walked on the moon. www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/...

theatlantic.com

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 04/06/2026

Marketing was never totally honest work, but somehow we've landed in a place where even white-hat, straightforward selling needs to involve some element of a scam: - Interested in the thing I just described? DM or comment 'FARTS' to get in. - Take my free quiz [only one result & it ends in a pitch]

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David Demaree @demar.ee · 04/06/2026

Windows, my friend, if you're gonna encourage me to use AI search to fix settings, you can't just shrug when I ask for something you don't like.

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