Stuff I Find
Resilience
Hi all,
1.This week I was messing about with ways to customise Claude. These split into Connectors (for connecting Claude to your email or calendar), Skills (providing pre-built prompts which help Claude do something like write in your voice for instance) and Plugins. I thought I’d focus on plugins today. Plugins pre-built, role-based setups that package together the tools Claude needs to be useful for a specific type of work. Instead of needing the skills and experience to configure everything manually, a plugin combines relevant capabilities into a single, ready-to-use bundle tailored to areas like marketing, legal, sales, or operations. This means you can install a plugin and immediately start working with a version of Claude that’s already optimised for that function rather than starting from a blank slate. So for instance, a non-lawyer might use the legal plugin when dealing with everyday business documents they don’t fully understand. For example, if you receive a contract from a supplier, you could use the plugin to pull the document in, have Claude summarise the key terms in plain English, highlight any risks or unusual clauses, and suggest questions you should ask before signing. Instead of needing legal training, you’re using the plugin to translate complex legal language into something practical, helping you make more informed decisions without immediately needing to involve a lawyer. When Claude announced these plugins, it triggered the ‘SaaSpocalypse’ wiping off around $285 billion in a day. It wasn’t just ‘AI got better’. This time the shift was AI moving from a tool to something that actually does the job software companies sell. Claude is starting to eat other people’s lunch at scale…..and make it easy.
2.Being the Taylor Sheridan nuts that we are, this week we’ve binge watched The Madison on Paramount Plus. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell as a married couple and their family. Russell’s character spends most of the first episode fly fishing in the Madison river with his brother. When it’s time to fly home in a light aircraft, there’s a nasty storm and that’s the end of Russell. The rest of the six episodes is the family coming to terms with his death and dealing with the challenges of the countryside which are unfamiliar to New Yorkers. I wouldn’t call it fun, but like everything else Sheridan touches, its compelling dialogue with characters that I care about, and I suspect you will too. Beautifully shot and well worth your time.
3.There’s a guy called Mat Armstrong who I first came across on Tiktok but I’ve since found him on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube and he’s become an unlikely favourite for me. Mat is a guy in his mid thirties I’d say, from somewhere in the north of England. He started making social media about his BMX biking and then around five years ago he started making videos about a written off Audi TT that he bought for nothing and brought back to life in a pub car park. Since that time he developed a nice proposition where he buys supercars (think Porsche and Ferrari) which have also been written off and repairs them regardless of their state. I’m not a mechanic but his resilience is inspiring and the way in which he’s not fazed by anything, however daunting the task seems. Recently someone approached him to repair his Bugatti Chiron which sparked a series of films where the Bugatti CEO started making Tiktoks telling him exactly why it was going to be impossible to repair. But he did it anyway. Find him on social media. It’s great fun.
Look after yourself,
Ben