Speed
How fast are we really going?
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I’m confused. Everybody on LinkedIn seems to be launching $1B 1-person, agentic SaaS companies that are revolutionizing marketing. At the same time, no one knows what the fuck is going on.
We are living in the middle of a contradiction.
The pace of change is - somehow - accelerating. It started in late November, when Claude quietly released the Opus 4.5 model (2 days before Thanksgiving!). In the intervening time, in between holiday travel and breaks, the digital world discovered the power of terminal access, bash, and MCP.
That was 8 weeks ago.
On the other hand, what is really different? Don’t rush this answer. I want you to marinate in this question for a while, because there is no easy answer.
Toby and Dan recently wrestled with this question in a conversation with Matt Britton, CEO of Suzy. As with any good ON_Discourse discussion, there was disagreement.
And like any decent newsletter post, there is a provocation.
Provocation of the week
Nothing is happening faster than ever.
Matt’s whole job is tracking the speed of culture (literally, his podcast is called that). He says he’s moving so fast he can’t stop to include his own team. “By the time I do, we’re going to miss the race.” He’s building things himself that would have taken a full engineering team a year.
It is an important point and there are few people who can make it in a more compelling way. Matt Britton has single-handedly built multiple tools that are pushing Suzy forward in this era of disruption.
But is he right? Dan had a decent pushback. For the self-motivated vibe-coders, this feels like a sprint that can either be won or lost. But the labor and consumer market is a different, slower story.
The people in our life, the ones that sit outside this AI hamster wheel of change are not getting these features yet. The agentic ads that are generated from a single prompt are seemingly indistinguishable from conventional processes.
We are seeing it every week at ON_Discourse. More and more members are showing off their AI stack. It is revealing. It is inspiring. It is occasionally overwhelming. There are times when I am astounded by the magic of this tech. And, like any good contradiction, there are times when we learn about a new tool that captures more data for more context to automagically generate a… deck.
I feel like standing athwart something.
What’s Next?
If you have thoughts, feedback, or a perspective worth sharing, reach out: chmiel@ondiscourse.com. You might see your reaction in next week’s edition.
ON_Member Events
ON_IRL Events (NYC)
ON_Speakeasy
Wednesday, January 28, 5:30pm-8pm ET
Join us for our monthly ON_Discourse Speakeasy Cocktails, hosted at Casa Komos and in partnership with Tequila Komos. No agenda, no panels, just excellent cocktails and great conversation with members and friends of ON_Discourse.
ON_Group Chats
Follow My Flow (Pulling back the curtain on someone’s AI stack)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 11am-12pm ET
This is your backstage pass into someone’s real AI workflow, a candid, step-by-step reveal of how their stack actually works in practice. The next host has built an agentic writing stack to assist creative writing.
ON_Podcast
Toby sits down with Segun Oduolowu—journalist, media veteran, and executive communications coach—at CES to talk about what AI is doing to communication, editorial judgment, and slop. Segun has worked across CNN, network TV, and digital, and now coaches C-suite executives on how to actually sound like themselves. He's pessimistic. The algorithm rewards clicks over facts. TikTokers with no credentials outpace real journalists. CEOs send unedited ChatGPT memos and wonder why no one trusts them. Toby pushes back with a case for human+AI collaboration. They don't fully agree.