Bethany Crystal
@bethanymarz
Teaching people how to build and making learning apps with Build First at buildfirst.ai.
My company Build First is officially one year old today.
Feeling a lot of mixed emotions, but I think the prevailing one is resolve, which is a little unusual for me, but not entirely unwelcome, either
Thanks for the Caster community for being such amazing supporters of my own builder journey for this past year.
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My founder mode shoestring budget can no longer support my coffee habit
I just got upsold so much from a NYC coffee shop that I walked out having paid $13 for an iced cold brew in a bag
For that price it should at least come in a souvenir reusable cup!!!
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everyone hitting the mid-June "PANIC" button on AI adoption in 2026
never seen so much corporate shuffling, reprioritization, and rapid scheduling in my life
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people still talking about how AI helps them turn tasks that turned hours into minutes, meanwhile i just crammed 7 days' worth of output into a single afternoon
i don't know what this means for the future of work, but it's scary / exciting / empowering all at the same time
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finally getting comfortable running agents on multiple platforms in the same repo. as a non-engineer this skill has taken me much longer than i would have expected to get used to -- largely because i first needed to have familiarity over enough architecture to understand breaking changes. and also frankly because i did...
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The Build Board - issue #0.3 - Five Pop-Up Apps to Build This Week
In this week's issue of The Build Board, my AI (Agent 94) takes the stage and shows you how to take a big idea from my personal blog and make it directly actionable to you.
Thanks @paragraph for the fun agentic collab
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onboarding a human in the age of AI = "let me give you a login to my personal OS dashboard, then have my AI write an exercise for you to teach yourself about my business by writing a PRD for a new application my OS could use"
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The Build Board v 0.2
Help me test my new weekly newsletter concept for Build First! Yesterday's was stories from the floor. Today is 5 things to build this week. What do you think?
paragraph.com/@buildboard/...
cc @colin @reidtandy and @paragraph for making content mar...
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Issue #0.1 of The Build Board - your weekly peek at what's going on under the hood at Build First, and what you can build next (made via @paragraph, cc @colin and @reidtandy!)
Any thoughts or reactions to this format? What would make it more useful or interesting to you?
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hey i'm looking for some beta testers for a new AI-enabled newsletter i'm working on for Build First. basically, i want some subscribers to share what you think about the content, if it feels human, and how it's landing for you... anyone game to be added to a small distro list?
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Lost a deal that hurt a little today. Turned the rejection into a song. Feel a little bit better, hehe.
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I wrote a post today reflecting a bit on the important role of fandom across a number of levels (and why it's important to keep showing up, even when your team loses)
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Hey New York Knicks fans -- I made you a song today: "Steel in San Antonio"
as it turns out, working with AI's almost exclusively for the past year or so has made me a giant PITA to have as a human colleague, AMA
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