Bethany Crystal
@bethanymarz
Teaching people how to build and making learning apps with Build First at buildfirst.ai.
This is so cute slash maybe small potatoes stuff but this is the first week of Build First that I got to text 3 people on Friday afternoon and thank them for a great week of working together.
Realized it’s the first time in years I’ve had multiple coworker relationships at one time. ❤️👏
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I spent 5 days with Fable 5, and it's helped me breathe life into 5 dead codebases.
One year ago, I spent a weekend running a "hackathon for one" where I pulled my entire blog over 10 years into an AI vector store.
I pulled an overnighter. I struggled through hosting and doodled through bugs. Two days later, it all ...
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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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