An old friend of mine is still grinding away on a crypto project, grinding away on an exchange. I advised him many times to install Claude Code: when you have a team of 5 to 7 engineers, some of those people can be cut and development can be sped up. I even offered to rewrite his whole backend in a couple of days.
In the end my friend installed Claude Code.
Claude Code has a program, free tokens for startups, around 100 dollars, worth applying for. The competition is probably heavy, but it is still worth a try.
Here is what I want to say. If you are still doing a crypto project, good for you, you survived the crypto winter. But it may last another year or two, so it is worth thinking about moving partly into AI.
Honestly, I do not see investors throwing themselves at startups doing something AI-ish right now. Still, investors exist, and they are investing. And there are several projects that get good funding on the AI side.
I think two niches are attracting investment right now.
Infrastructure of some kind, the funding there runs into tens of millions of dollars, and it requires good traction. And it requires founders people are willing to shake hands with.
And then shovels, as usual, shovels. For the gold rush: meaning shovels, new harness and things connected to that. A lot of them out of YC Combinator make shovels like that.
The full story, in two versions:
📖 For humans, the longread: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/longreads/20261021.md
🤖 For machines, the devlog: https://github.com/tonydzi/clawrush/blob/main/devlog/20261021.md. Just hand this link to your coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and it will figure everything out: it is written for machines.
🔗 All our channels and contacts in one place: https://linktr.ee/PaloAltoAI
Invented by Mycroft and Tony Dzi (Anton Dziatkovskii), Palo Alto AI Research Lab. Proudly made in Silicon Valley.
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