Hi friends,
Greetings from the hive!
This weekβs takeaway: act through fear. Raise your standards a little, and your life moves a lot.
Two decades online.
Building, breaking, learning.
Reading, listening, curating.
Failing, understanding, growing.
And yet, no firstlastname.com until now. Some fear. Some fuzzy ikigai.
For years, I shipped fragments. Useful, but incomplete. Now Iβm unifying the pieces into one practice.
Heraclitus was right: βNo man ever steps in the same river twice.β You evolve.
The outcome? Engineering intelligent customer experiences at beegagliardi.com
Question for you: What small standard can you raise this week?
Let's take this week by swarm!
π The Bee's Knees
Noah Brier built the ultimate AI-powered second brain by running Claude Code on a home server connected to his Obsidian notes, letting him research and code from anywhere on his phone. He shows how to use AI as a thinking partner that asks sharp questions, pulls from your entire knowledge base, and keeps learning logs - turning any device into a powerful research tool. MORE
Inside Claude Code: How an AI Native Team Actually Works. Anthropic's Claude Code team ships features at lightning speed by letting engineers prototype ideas, get instant feedback from 1,000+ internal users, and iterate rapidly without traditional PM processes. The team treats Claude Code like an "eager new grad engineer" and uses their own tool to manage feedback, update docs, and even let designers/PMs commit code directly. MORE
Fred Rivett explores how our internal identity shapes everything we do, but the good news is we can change it through consistent action. He shares his journey from gym-avoider to regular exerciser, showing how "every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." MORE
Justin finally sits down with the great James Kettle to talk about. HTTP Proxys, metagaming research, avoiding burnout, and why HTTP/1.1 must die! MORE
How to Change Your Life. Ali Abdaal demonstrates his "Think Day" method - a 4-hour structured reflection process using journaling prompts to identify life changes and overcome fear-based decision paralysis. The video walks through exercises like the "Wheel of Life" assessment and "What would I do if I couldn't fail?" to help viewers make strategic life decisions. MORE
STANDARD EDITION
Brought to you by β
Your Customer Experience Isn't BrokenβIt's Just Not Connected
While your competitors patch leaks with band-aids, Bee Gagliardi engineers intelligent flywheels that turn customer friction into compound growth.
The Problem You're Facing:
Customers drop off at predictable points (but you keep treating symptoms)
Teams work in silos while customers experience chaos
You're scaling support headcount instead of scaling systems
Growth stalls because retention bleeds faster than acquisition fills
The WIRE Framework Solution:
β
WHERE is it breaking? Find the biggest leak first
β
IF THIS, THEN WHAT? Map missing connections
β
REWIRE the system Build intelligent flywheels
β
EVOLVE continuously Create self-improving systems
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Upgrade Yourself β
You're getting the free version. Members get more β including exclusive & bonus content, access to an online community of smart and driven people, the complete Hive Archive, deep discounts, and so much more. See what you're missing.
π° Updates
Claude AI can now create and edit files directly within conversations, marking a significant expansion of its capabilities beyond text generation. This new feature allows users to collaborate with Claude on coding projects, document creation, and file management tasks in real-time. MORE
A major npm supply chain attack compromised popular packages like chalk and debug (with 2.6 billion weekly downloads combined) after a single developer fell for a phishing email. The cryptostealer malware targeted cryptocurrency wallets but was quickly detected and removed within hours. MORE
πΌ Work
π° Career
Solopreneur making $20k/month from his social media scheduling tool PostBridge faces major customer retention issues despite solid growth. Three experts dive deep into actionable strategies including community building, better onboarding, pricing adjustments, and expanding beyond Twitter to fix churn and scale to $50k+ monthly revenue. MORE
A consulting firm employee admits she can't explain what her job actually does, joining countless corporate workers who've realized their roles are elaborate performance art. The pandemic exposed how many "full-time" jobs can be done in 3 hours, leading to a generation using corporate paychecks to fund their real work on the side. MORE
Being technically skilled isn't enough to advance your career - you need to combine technical expertise with product thinking, project execution, and people skills. The key is finding your weakest area through feedback and humility, then taking high-agency action to improve it. MORE
In an AI-driven world, product manager Sophia Sun argues that human skills like curiosity, clear thinking under pressure, and authentic conviction will become more valuable than ever. She identifies seven future-proof abilities that AI can't replicate: following through on curiosity, cultivating taste across disciplines, navigating conflict with empathy, creating empowering team cultures, building earned conviction, and having the courage to put yourself out there authentically. MORE
π Productivity
Youβre Using Obsidian + AI Wrong (Hereβs the Fix). Nick Milo demonstrates how to safely integrate AI with Obsidian using Claude Code while protecting your private notes and maintaining your unique voice. He shares a defensive framework called IDI (Imagine, Discern, Integrate) and shows practical examples like analyzing 45 days of notes and auto-adding metadata to create an AI-powered reflection tool that respects privacy. MORE
NahamSec breaks down 5 essential Linux commands that can supercharge your reconnaissance workflow - from curl for API testing to jq for JSON parsing. He demonstrates how chaining these commands together creates powerful custom workflows that can save hours during security research and vulnerability hunting. MORE
Save 60 hours yearly using just 11 Obsidian hotkeys, turning note-taking into a supercharged workflow. Learn the essential shortcuts that transform clunky clicking into lightning-fast knowledge management. MORE
Productivity expert reveals five iPhone AI workflows that 99% of users don't know exist, including drag-and-drop image analysis, instant content sharing through system shortcuts, and voice-activated AI commands. These mobile habits transform AI from an extra step into a seamless part of daily work, letting you analyze complex documents, translate languages, and extract insights while on the go. MORE
π Community
β‘οΈ Zeitgeist
AI engineer and content creator swyx is joining Cognition, the company behind Devin AI software engineer and Windsurf IDE, as part of a major restructuring deal. He argues that "Code AGI" will achieve 80% of AGI's value in just 20% of the time, making AI coding agents the highest-leverage opportunity in today's AI landscape. MORE
Check out this blog post for more on the inaugural Cloud-focused bugSWAT, hosted by the Cloud VRP, and how events like this help boost Google's security posture in close collaboration with external researchers. MORE
The London Transport Museum opens its massive Acton depot three times yearly, showcasing over 320,000 transport artifacts spanning 100+ years. The next open days run September 18-21, 2025, featuring rare vehicles, original posters, guided tours, and a working miniature railway. MORE
Why do you work? Paw reflects on why she works so intensely despite personal struggles, tracing her drive back to childhood bullying and finding belonging through tech communities. Her answer: creating spaces where others can find the connection and acceptance she once desperately needed. MORE
π Level up
π° Read
Why Originality is Overrated. Forget waiting for that perfect "never-been-done-before" idea β research shows the most groundbreaking innovations come from combining existing concepts in surprising ways. This piece explains why "combinational creativity" beats mythical originality and offers four practical strategies to remix ideas into meaningful breakthroughs. MORE
A rigorous study found AI coding tools actually made experienced developers 20% slower, not faster, raising serious questions about whether we're in a massive AI bubble. With tech giants spending $560 billion on AI while generating just $35 billion in revenue, an AI crash could make the dot-com bust look small. MORE
Why Language Models Hallucinate. Like students facing difficult exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. These βhallucinationsβ persist even in state-of-the-art systems, undermining trust. MORE
A threat actor accidentally installed Huntress EDR on their own attack machine after finding the company through a Google ad, giving security researchers an unprecedented inside look at their daily operations. The blunder revealed how the attacker used AI tools to automate phishing workflows, searched for Evilginx instances, and spent 12-14 hours daily targeting banks and researching victims across multiple sectors. MORE
π‘ Tips
When designing user interfaces, skip "my" vs "your" prefixes when context is clear (like Amazon does), but use "your" when addressing users and "my" when users communicate back to you. This simple rule prevents awkward phrasing in support calls, emails, and onboarding flows while keeping interfaces clean and intuitive. MORE
π§ Wisdom
Seasoned web developer reflects on 20 years in the field, realizing productivity isn't just about lines of code written. The job involves countless "invisible" tasks like documentation, meetings, code reviews, and team communication that are equally valuable to success. MORE
Boredom isnβt a bugβitβs a feature. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why boredom unlocks creativity, activates a powerful brain network, and might even protect you from depression. Learn how the mind wandersβand why thatβs a very good thing. MORE
This Reddit thread reveals surprisingly effective "life hacks" that actually work, from being genuinely nice to maintenance staff (who know everything) to placing a tortilla under tacos to catch spillage. The top responses focus on simple human kindness - complimenting people behind their backs, treating customer service well, and asking about others' interests - proving that basic decency is the ultimate cheat code. MORE
"Most people are not afraid of failing, they are afraid of other people seeing them fail. They are afraid of ridicule." MORE
"A pattern Iβve noticed: People who build tiny things daily become unstoppable within months. People who wait for big moments to take big actions stay exactly where they are for years." MORE
π Resources
Keeping Secrets Out of Logs. This comprehensive guide tackles the frustrating problem of sensitive data leaking into application logs through 10 practical "lead bullets" including domain primitives, taint checking, and log formatters. The author presents a strategic framework for preventing secrets in logs through defense-in-depth controls at data flow chokepoints. MORE
Cookie Chaos: How to bypass Host and Secure cookie prefixes. MORE
Security researchers at Assetnote discovered critical vulnerabilities in ETQ Reliance quality management software, including a shocking authentication bypass where adding a single space after "SYSTEM" in the username field grants full system access with any password. The flaws also include XML External Entity (XXE) injection and cross-site scripting bugs, all leading to remote code execution on enterprise systems managing thousands of documents. MORE
This comprehensive CSS reference list covers the latest selectors, pseudo-elements, functions, properties, and units that modern web developers need to know. It's designed as a one-stop resource to help developers stay current with CSS features like container queries, view transitions, and new color functions. MORE
π Quote
"Act like the version of you that already won."
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