Hi friends,
Greetings from the hive!
I'm bringing back Recommendations.
I did recommendations twice: CiarΓ‘n Cotter aka monkehack and Serena aka Shenetworks. Then I stopped. Why? Too much operational work. Plus, I overthought it.
This time I'm keeping it simple.
Here's what I want: your tools, your habits, your media diet. The exact stack of the smartest hackers and builders.
I'm calling it Cross-Pollinate. Just reply to this email if you want to be featured π«
Let's take this week by swarm!
π The Bee's Knees
I'm 42. If you're in your 30s, watch this. Mark emphasizes that self-discipline is the ultimate form of self-care and that growth often requires a higher tolerance for pain and discomfort. He argues that true freedom comes from abandoning the need for external approval and that maturity is defined by prioritizing worthwhile, difficult tasks over easy, fun distractions. MORE
How To Get Ahead Of 90% Of People in 2026. Developing "good taste" is a vital competitive moat in the AI era, defined as mastering a specific aesthetic language to authentically communicate an identity. This four-step process involves deciding what to say, blindly copying masters, learning the underlying rules, and studying the historical context to eventually create something unique. MORE
LiteLLM Malware Found on PyPI. A poisoned version of the popular LiteLLM Python package was found stealing credentials and spawning thousands of rogue processes. The malicious version was reported and removed within 72 minutes of discovery. MORE
How Stripe Deploys 1,300 AI-Written PRs Per Week. Steve Kaliski explains how Stripe went from AI experiments to deploying 1,300+ AI-authored pull requests weekly. A concrete look at what AI-assisted engineering looks like at production scale. MORE
Some Things Just Take Time. Armin argues that our obsession with AI-powered speed is creating software and companies with shelf lives measured in months, not decades. He warns that removing friction from processes like compliance and code reviews may actually harm quality, as some things genuinely require time to build trust and lasting value. MORE
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π Discover
ποΈ News
Running Tesla's Computer on My Desk. A researcher bought salvaged Tesla Model 3 hardware on eBay and got it running at home using Tesla's public wiring diagrams. They found open SSH and a diagnostic API, opening new avenues for bug bounty research. MORE
Inside a Kubernetes Scanning Fleet. A sophisticated K8s cluster in Paris logged 13 million recon sessions in 90 days, targeting config files, n8n vulns, and critical infrastructure. Timing suggests possible pre-positioning ahead of regional conflict escalation. MORE
Package Managers Are Blocking Supply Chain Attacks. Major ecosystems including JavaScript, Python, and Rust now support "cooldown" features that delay newly published packages by days, stopping most supply chain attacks before they spread. MORE
Leveling Up Secure Code Reviews with Claude Code. Security teams can use targeted system prompts to trace user input through unfamiliar codebases faster than manual review. Claude Code helps identify vulnerabilities without reading every function. MORE
GitHub Is Training on Your Private Code. Unless you opt out by April 24, GitHub uses your private repos to train AI models when you interact with Copilot. Business accounts are protectedβfree and pro users need to act now. MORE
π Community
We've stopped buying SaaS. Warp's CEO Zach Lloyd shares how his team ditched expensive SaaS tools and built custom AI agents instead, saving over $10,000 annually. They replaced documentation platforms, community monitoring tools, and data analytics subscriptions with just-in-time apps that do the same work for free. MORE
Little Free Pantry. A grassroots movement building small neighborhood pantries to address food insecurity block by block. Simple, human, and worth knowing about. MORE
American Cotton, Detroit Craft. Soft Goods Mfg makes quality basicsβt-shirts, sweatersβbuilt for everyday wear by real people. Worth supporting when you need a tee that isn't fast fashion. MORE
Bug Bounties in the Age of AI. An interview from RSA Conference 2026 on why bug bounty programs remain critical even as AI accelerates both offense and defense. People aren't perfect, and incentivized reporting still matters. MORE
The Malleable Software That Never Was. Karri Saarinen (Linear CEO) argues that the dream of "malleable software" that users can endlessly customize has failed to gain real traction. He believes agents will soon compress UIs into simpler primitives, making extensive customization unnecessary as AI handles user needs directly. MORE
π Follow
Awesome accounts to follow. Randomly selected from my curated Twitter lists.
@dvassallo - Daniel Vassallo. Bad for the economy (in a good way).
@excid3 - Chris Oliver. Rails Luminary building indie tools and hosting the Remote Ruby Podcast.
@irsdl - Soroush Dalili. Web appsec specialist, trainer, tool builder, and certified dad-joke maker.
@avlidienbrunn - Mathias Karlsson. Web security fiddler and bug bounty bastard.
@tenderlove - Aaron Patterson. Works at Shopify. Opinions are his own.
π Explore
The Old Internet Is Still Here. The best personal blogs, forums, and niche communities haven't disappearedβthey've just been buried under algorithmic feeds. Rediscovering them requires the old-school skill of active exploration. MORE
The Land Footprint of Food. Around 45% of the world's habitable land is used to grow food. Changing what we eat and how we farm could reshape what Earth looks like from space. MORE
Beautiful, Boring, and Without Soul. A designer argues that beautiful products often lack soul because makers ignore emotional depth. Building meaningful experiences requires tending to your own humanity first. MORE
Design Systems Report 2026. 61% of design system teams are understaffed and adoption is stalling despite high user trust. AI shows promise for documentation and automation, but practitioners remain skeptical of AI-generated design work. MORE
Kagi Translate Has a LinkedIn Mode. Type something honest and Kagi will translate it into polished corporate-speak. Also supports 248 actual languages with document translation, voice input, and proofreading. MORE
π οΈ Build
π§° Try
Email.md. Write responsive HTML emails using simple markdown instead of messy table-based HTML. Converts to email-safe markup that works across all clients without manual coding. MORE
Sneaky Header Blocker Trick. A pure CSS technique using sticky positioning and "blocker" elements that change a site header's appearance as you scroll. No JavaScript required. MORE
Hosting a Snowflake Proxy. A developer spun up a censorship circumvention proxy in five minutes on a spare server, serving nearly 100GB of traffic in two weeks at almost no cost. MORE
SentrySearch. Search video footage by typing what you're looking forβthe tool returns a trimmed clip of the matching moment. Uses Gemini embeddings or a local model to connect text queries to video content. MORE
Claude Code Skills for Entrepreneurs. Sahil Lavingia built 10 Claude Code skills based on The Minimalist Entrepreneur covering community building, idea validation, pricing, and sustainable growth. MORE
π Ship
AI Agents for SaaS on a $7/Month VPS. A SaaS founder used Claude Code and OpenClaw to automate marketing workflows while keeping costs low with cloud-hosted models. She stores skills as portable markdown files that move across tools as the agent landscape evolves. MORE
Building a Digital Doorman. An AI agent running on a cheap VPS answers portfolio questions by reading actual codeβnot just repeating a resume. Two separate agents handle public and private queries via IRC with strict security boundaries and spending caps. MORE
Rewrote JSONata in a Day, Saved $500K/Year. A team rebuilt JSONata as a Go library in 7 hours for $400, achieving 1,000x performance gains and eliminating $300K/year in Node.js fleet costs. MORE
Vibe Coding SwiftUI Apps. Simon Willison built two macOS apps using AI assistance without opening Xcodeβentire apps in single files. Practical proof that rapid native development is now accessible to non-iOS developers. MORE
Basecamp Goes Agent Native. Basecamp released a CLI and SDK letting AI agents manage projects, tasks, and communications directly. A step toward bringing your own AI agent to your project management workflow. MORE
π° Advance
The Lovable Score. Elena Verna created a composite metric combining NPS, product-market fit, satisfaction, and ease of use to measure genuine user affection. Helps teams distinguish between tolerated products and truly beloved ones. MORE
How to Be a 10x Engineer. An elite engineer with almost no public GitHub presence succeeds through strong communication, clear boundaries, and relationship-building. Framing delays as stakeholder choices rather than personal failures is the key move. MORE
How I'd Create Content in 2026. Ali Abdaal shares what he'd do differently starting content creation fresh today, given how platforms and tools have shifted. MORE
3 Systems Every Small Business Needs. Strong operations beat hustle every time. This video breaks down three foundational systems to build before you desperately need them. MORE
How Microsoft's AI VP Automates Everything. Marco Casalaina demos how he uses AI and Warp terminal to automate his daily workflow at Microsoft. Dense with practical power-user habits. MORE
π Quote
"If you don't set goals for yourself, you are doomed to achieve the goals of someone else."
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