AI and I

Two years ago, Katie Parrott was laid off from a crypto firm and couldn’t afford a career coach—so she turned to a $20-a-month ChatGPT subscription instead.The Every staff writer’s habit of feeding AI good context eventually became compound writing, a codified system for brainstorming, drafting, and editing with AI. Today, that system is a plugin any writer can use.On this week’s AI & I, Natalia Quintero talks with Katie about turning good ingredients into good writing, borrowing the taste of writers she admires, and why AI helped her fall back in love with the page.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Natalia Quintero:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow her on X: @NataliaZarinaTimestamps for YouTube:0:00 Start0:49 Introduction1:21 How Katie went from being laid off to using ChatGPT as a career coach8:06 Turning AI into a “content agency of one”10:59 Building the context files and style guides that make AI outputs useful14:15 What makes a Claude project actually work21:18 How AI helped with a mental health crisis and “computer errands”27:03 Katie’s career coach, now a fully autonomous Codex project32:27 What compounding means, and building the Compound Writing plugin38:00 Borrowing Vonnegut, Hitchcock, and Sorkin as AI editing skills44:49 Katie’s thesis: education and access will matter more than everLinks to resources mentioned in the episode:Katie Parrott on X: @kplikethebirdCompound writing plugin: ⁠https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-writingCompound engineering plugin (Kieran Klassen): github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-pluginParrott’s companion piece on compound writing: https://every.to/guides/compound-writingParrott, “I Hired ChatGPT as My Career Coach”: every.to/working-overtime/i-hired-chatgpt-as-my-career-coachParrott, “AI Turned Me Into a Content Agency of One”: every.to/working-overtime/ai-turned-me-into-a-content-agency-of-one

LLMs are a new medium for storytelling.That’s according to the creators of Portola, the company behind Tolan: an embodied AI companion that lives on its own planet and chats to you with a distinct personality. In 2025, Portola's founder and CEO Quinten Farmer and Head of Story Eliot Peper joined Dan Shipper to explain how they’re building this new medium from scratch. Their aim is to help users go from overwhelmed to grounded through conversations with Tolan that feel personal and spontaneous, not scripted. On this week’s AI & I, Dan revisits his conversation with Quinten and Eliot. They discuss why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces, how Portola designs AI personalities users will click with, and why character-driven AI could become a new computing interface. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperGo to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.Timestamps: 00:01:30 - Introduction 00:04:07 - Talking to the Portola CEO's Tolan, Clarence 00:09:11 - How Portola went from building software for kids to AI companions 00:23:40 - Why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces 00:29:54 - Tolans don't use scripted prompts—they're taught to improvise 00:37:23 - How to know which AI personalities your users will click with 00:42:27 - Developing the character traits of an AI companion 00:49:48 - What does it mean to build technology that makes us flourish 01:01:10 - How Portola evaluates whether Tolans are resonating with users 01:11:01 - Inside Portola's viral growth strategy

Most consumer AI so far has been single-player: you and a chatbot, alone.Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel, one of Pinterest's first 30 employees, is betting that's about to change. She's looking for a product genius who can build an AI product with social DNA: status, network effects, and multiplayer dynamics. That'll enable users of ChatGPT and other models to learn from how others use AI and level up.On this week’s AI & I, Dan Shipper revisits his conversation with Sarah. They talk about why technical founders dominate the early days of a platform shift while product-minded founders win later, what ChatGPT is still missing, and what separates a founder's real network effect from a slide with a flywheel diagram.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperTimestamps for YouTube:0:00 Start1:10 Introduction2:26 Why the future of consumer AI belongs to founders with product intuition11:09 What Sarah sees as ChatGPT's biggest weakness18:45 How Sarah would design a consumer AI app with social DNA24:10 The kind of founders Sarah invests in28:33 How to know if your startup's network effects are real35:40 What's catching Sarah's eye beyond AI40:41 How AI will change the way top venture capitalists investLinks to resources mentioned in the episode:Sarah Tavel on X: https://x.com/sarahtavelBenchmark: https://benchmark.comAgentio (marketplace for YouTube creators and brands): https://agentio.com/ Chainalysis: https://chainalysis.comThe Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007BZBRB8Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBBW23PM

Yash Poojary, a growth engineer at Every, dropped an idea for a campaign in Slack at 7 p.m. Instead of building it himself, Every’s head of growth Austin Tedesco took a screenshot of the Slack thread, dropped it into Codex, typed "Can you do this?", and went to the gym.By the time he got back, Codex had built four audience segments, drafted emails for each one, and pulled a social image that had worked before. It took Austin 10 minutes to make some tweaks and schedule the whole thing to send the next morning. Within a few hours, it generated more than $25,000 in revenue. That story came out of the launch week for All Access, Every’s new $625-a-year membership built around the Builder Pack. It includes $7,000 in credits and free usage from ten of the AI products Every uses every day, including Claude Max, Codex, Cursor Pro+, PostHog, Notion, Framer, Render, and Flora.On this episode of AI & I, four of Every's own builders—COO Brandon Gell, head of marketing Douglas Brundage, as well as Yash and Austin—sit down to show how they use AI, breaking down their personal stacks and giving insight into their own strategies and mindset for building.If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!To hear more from Dan Shipper:Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribeFollow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipperTimestamps for YouTube:0:00 Intro 0:35 All Access Explained 3:01 Yash's Tech Stack and How He's Automating Testing Pipelines 8:02 The Idea to Execution Loop 10:25 How an Agent Turned an Idea into $25K 17:50 The AI Sandwich Workflow 22:03 Making AI Tools Accessible to Solo Builders 28:50 Douglas on Brand and Design34:51 Tips on What to Build First 43:46 What's Next for All AccessLinks to resources mentioned in the episode:Brandon Gell on X: https://x.com/bran_don_gellYash Poojary on X: https://x.com/poojary_yashAustin Tedesco on X: https://x.com/tedescau?lang=enDouglas Brundage on X: https://x.com/DABrundageIntroducing Every All Access: https://every.to/on-every/introducing-every-all-accessGet the Builder Pack: every.to/builder-pack Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year.