Brian Levine

Oh cool. We’re making fun of short people again.

I don't know what you all look like when you bite into a burger, but it's not better than that. Give me a break.

I've been using Claude Code regularly for the past six months or so. Most of the code I've produced since October was written by and through Claude. This week I wrote some code without Claude and it just kinda feels good. Not sure if that's useful or interesting to anyone else, but there you go.

Billy did NOT die on the way back to their home planet.

The reason I don't have a personal assistant is not that I can't afford one (though I can't). It's that I don't need one. I'm gonna guess that most people don't need one.

Life update: I can't stop putting Tabasco brand sriracha on everything I eat.

Are you people really addicted to Claude Code and company? I can't tell if it's hyperbole or if folks are really texting their agents during dinner.

I'm 48 years old and I primarily choose mass market beers over craft beers now. What have I become?

Water from the public fountains in Rome tastes better.

Or, in the parlance of our times...

Street water just hits different.

Back on my bullshit*.

* 𝘍𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥-𝘣𝘰𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘨𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘧 𝘢 𝘫𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩.

Y’all not beating the solipsism allegations.

It should go without saying that you're all robots and I'm the only one who is real.

Go ahead. Lead me into temptation. I think I can take it.

It's great!

A notebook covered in stickers, including one of Billy, the magenta yeti. Billy is holding a sign that says “Abolish work.”

This is the journal cover I have with me at all times. Long live Billy.

It was wonderful working with you. And stickers of Billy are plastered in cities around the world now. From NYC to Rome to Tokyo.

And a specific shout out to @yeahpapayaya.bsky.social for the incredible illustrations. Billy forever.

Game Over We’re shutting down Yetto in February -— by which we mean Yetto the helpdesk (which has been shut down for a while), Dashbort the support data tool (which was our pivot), and Lox Populi, Inc. (which i...

I'm shutting down Yetto, the app and the company.

It was a fucking blast and I have a lot of thoughts, but now's not the time. So here's a little send off.

Let me know if you want to talk or hang out or work on something together.

balevine.com/2026/01/29/g...

Let's see Paul Allen's claude.md file.

Thanks for sharing! I was a skeptic until I started using some of these tools back in March of last year. The constant shifting is tough to navigate, and I'm developing a lot of opinions which may or may not be good or even make sense. So I love reading about what other smart folks are thinking.

Listen to this guy.

The year everything changed Far from my best years being behind me, it feels as though everything in my life has been leading to this moment: building a completely new category of product where the most useful lessons come not f...

If you're a developer surrounded by people debating the utility of LLMs, you are being misled.

The advent of agents decisively settles the conversation. The real question is: how do you ship software that leverages their power?

I spent 2025 answering this question

networkgames.fyi/the-year-eve...

I read about Gas Town and the Ralph Wiggum loop over the last few weeks, along with a bunch of similar and related ideas. This week I tried a mish-mash of approaches and ended up building a desktop app to manage concurrent Claude sessions. Started using it on Dashbort and damn this is cool stuff.

Normalize day drinking.

Buh.

Hambug.

If you’re going out to eat over the holidays and tipping less than 25% regardless of the quality of the service, I think you’re a bad person.

(This is specific to the United States. Europeans can stay out of this.)

Billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to use social media. Or computers. They can earn that privilege back by giving away their money.

It’s weird that “ham fisted” is an insult.

I've been searching for a way to describe the feeling for a while. This nails it.