Behold a million onions
2026 is officially at the halfway mark, and AI continues to dominate everything: markets, mindshare, podcasts, earnings calls, and especially the breathless headlines around every new model release: Who’s on top? What new capability changes everything? Which benchmark got obliterated this week? How impressive is the reasoning? Yadda yadda.
Meanwhile, as everyone gets swept up in the latest model announcement, I can’t stop thinking about onions.
I make a pasta dish for my family that’s mostly onions. It’s a simple recipe, takes about 1-2 hours of prep but then it’s an all-day cook-about 12 hours-and somehow even better the next day.
The most tedious part is chopping the onions. The recipe calls for roughly 6-8 lbs of them. I’ve often thought about using a food processor to speed it up. But then I realize… why? Chopping onions isn’t the bottleneck.
The dish still has to simmer for hours. The meat still has to brown. Everything else still has to happen. Speeding up one step doesn’t magically make dinner arrive any sooner because that step is just one part of a much larger system.
That’s the lens through which I'm starting to view AI.
A lot of AI content focuses on the speed of doing...something: how quickly you can generate code, build an app, spin up a SaaS product, or crank out side project after side project. Every week someone declares SaaS is dead or that we’re living through the SaaSpocalypse.
But the question I keep coming back to is: Is any of it actually valuable? What are you doing with the code you generated? What happened to the products you built? Did they solve a real problem? Did you use them? Did anyone? Show me.
It’s like replacing my chef’s knife with an industrial onion processor. Yesterday I was chopping a few pounds of onions by hand. Today I can process a million onions an hour. Isn't that amazing! Look at the pile of onions! That never would been possible before! And this is the worst it will be!
Cool but WTF am I supposed to do with a million onions?
The latest models, reasoning breakthroughs, benchmarks, harnesses, Fable, Mythos, open weights… the conversation has become obsessed with maximizing one part of the pipeline. People are floating on air because they’re “10x more productive.” My follow-up question is always the same: To what end?
Don’t tell me about the 35 side projects you built over the weekend and never opened again. Tell me about the product that’s meaningfully better because of AI. Tell me about the customer whose life improved. Tell me about the business that grew. Tell me about the 3-5x revenue that goes with your 10-20x productivity boost. Tell me about the family that enjoyed the finished meal.
Business Update
FeedGeni - Nothing to report here. Stacking revenue and debt servicing.
SPT - New site launched, updated Shopify listing and a TON of new features focused on the manufacturer ICP discussed last month. Next up is beefing up the B2B story now that Shopify has opened it up to non-Plus merchants.
No Fixed Plans - Continuing to look at potential deals but letting a ton of pitches go by. Kinda content to focus on the small number of interesting consulting projects I'm into for now. Also started putting cash towards other passive investments like art and real estate.
Watching / Listening
World Cup - Vai Vozinha
House of the Dragon is back on and boy those dragons are dancing. Time to lock in if you haven't.
Pinata by Gary, IN product Freddie Gibbs & your favorite producers favorite producer, Madlib (not to be confused with your favorite rappers favorite rapper. It never really clicked with this when it came out in 2014 (I also just had a kid, so throw me some bail) but Madlibs music has been on constant rotation every since my buddy Matt intro'd him to me back in '02. Randomly put Pinata on the other week and it hasn't left my ears since.
Tuneshine - To go with the the above, the owner of Tuneshine released Roon support and man what a fun addition to the office its been. Add some whimsy to your life.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. - Benjamin Franklin
Stay cool midwest peeps 🥶
