February 23rd, 2026
In the Spotlight: Building in the Age of AI
Happy Monday, friends. I hope you all enjoyed your weekend. I spent mine in Nashville for a Billy Strings concert—always a top-three concert experience for me, no matter how many times I've seen him.
This week, Evan and I sat down to dig into something we're both living inside every day: what it actually looks like to build with AI right now. Since we’re both full time on Valent, we are deep in the weeds of using artificial intelligence across every part of the business.
This isn't a theoretical conversation about where AI might go—we do our best to provide as many concrete examples from our own experience as possible. We wanted to pull back the curtain on what's actually working, what we're learning, and where we think this is all heading.
We get into how Valent's senior developer—a former Squarespace staff engineer who initially resisted AI coding tools—compressed months of work into a long weekend and now says he'd never go back. We talk about how I've rebuilt Middle Tech's production process using Claude projects, brand context documents, and evaluated prompts that turn what used to be a full Sunday of work into a fraction of that. And Evan walks through how Valent is using OpenAI's reasoning models for signal-based sales outreach—finding intent signals like government contract wins and new hires, then crafting personalized outreach at exactly the right moment.
Then we get into the bigger picture: the OpenClaw saga, Moltbook's AI-only social network, and why the wrapper era is dying. What actually constitutes a moat when everyone can build software? And then we go further—self-driving as a platform, the US-China AI race, energy as the real bottleneck, and whether capitalism can survive a world where AI generates enormous wealth but most people don't have skin in the game.
It's the kind of conversation we'll probably look back on in a few years as either prescient or hilariously wrong. Maybe both. I hope you find it useful.
What We Discussed:
The Tools Are the Worst They'll Ever Be How AI is collapsing the barriers to building a company—from vibe coding MVPs to compressing developer timelines from months to days—and why the founders who go all-in on iteration right now will pull away from everyone else.
Document Everything, Then Feed It to AI Evan's playbook for turning recorded sales calls, strategy docs, and customer conversations into a data engine that replaces gut decisions with pattern recognition at scale.
OpenClaw Was a Cultural Moment, Not a Tech Breakthrough Why the most viral AI story of January was really about consumer awareness catching up to capability—and how Anthropic missed an opportunity while OpenAI seized one.
Slow Down to Speed Up Why enterprises can't adopt agentic AI as fast as startups, why governance and human-in-the-loop workflows are where real moats get built, and what happens when trusted systems finally get unlimited compute behind them.
The American Dream Has to Survive This Why AI-driven wealth creation without broader participation is the real dystopian risk—and how programs like Invest America, new corporate models, and equity ownership from birth might be the path forward.
Upcoming Events:
THIS WEDNESDAY - February 25th, 2026 - 5 Across Pitch Competition
5 Across returns for another year! 5 local startups will pitch for up to $5,500. Entrepreneurship, competition, and community collide. Come join us!
As a subscriber of Middle Tech, you can register for free at this link.
We hope you enjoy this episode! If you have any thoughts after listening, feel free to shoot me a message at [email protected]
Have a great week, friends!
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