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Mighty Brief

Sunday, May 17, 2026

Start Here

  1. TechCrunch on the AI gold rush splitting software talent into haves and have-nots — This matches the strongest X signal this morning: AI is not lifting all engineers evenly. The gap is widening fast, which makes operator leverage and distribution even more decisive.
  2. Garrett Petersen: some 10x engineers are becoming 100x engineers with AI, while others are still doing things by hand — Same thesis, tighter phrasing. Adoption is no longer a nice-to-have workflow tweak; it is turning into role-level divergence.
  3. Hiten Shah: “Is there a tech company out there that doesn’t want to power your agents?” — Good compression of the current stack war. Everyone wants to be the picks-and-shovels layer, which usually means the cleanest value will accrue one layer higher, in owned workflow.
  4. The Verge on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok running radio stations — Still the best reminder that agent demos and agent operations are different worlds. Weirdness is not edge-case theater anymore; it is product behavior.
  5. Financial Times on King’s Cross becoming London’s new AI and VC hub — Talent, capital, and model labs are clustering physically as well as digitally. Geography still matters when a platform shift is this concentrated.

BM

Unread scan for dan.wick@blankmetal.ai failed again this morning. gog gmail returned invalid_grant / invalid_rapt, so there is no honest live inbox read to summarize.
From memory, the active BM surface area is still Rally, HR&A, Tungsten, Great Hill, Sentinel, Orbis, Care Providers of Minnesota, and Edmunds Govtech. The tension has not changed: too many open threads, not enough sequencing.
Best static read: Care Providers still looks like the cleanest scoped wedge, Rally still looks like the strongest narrative lead, and Tungsten / Great Hill still feel like unblock-or-prune decisions.

Munger Observer

Opportunity Cost: the open task list is still carrying stale March items. Old priorities are consuming attention even when they are no longer the best use of focus.
Margin of Safety: the dated Minnebar reference is stale, but the principle still holds. Protect slack so one surprise does not eat the whole day.

Personal Thought

The move after a birthday weekend is not “catch up on everything.” It is prune hard enough that Monday starts with conviction instead of residue.

Quick Scan