Bethany Crystal | Paragraph

Bethany Crystal | Paragraph

Aug 11

Pray for me, I’m about to lead 25 academics through their very first Git pushes, pulls, forks, and merges…

Aug 10

Sitting on a plane vibe coding live, then built something on demand for the guy next to me. It blew him away. When I went back to my work, I watched him secretly text a coworker on the side asking if they can make an exception to their “no outside AI vendors” rule to bring me in for some lessons Here, thought I was teaching people AI, what im really doing is helping people rethink their relationship to technology.

Aug 9

It’s one of those weekends where I feel like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, prepping the house for the arrival of the big event…

Jul 29

Warning…

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Jul 27

You haven’t cut your teeth as a founder until you’ve gone from crying on a park bench to closing a $25k deal in person just 90 min later

Jul 24

officially on the market for a NYC office to house me starting Oct 1 made two fliers - one for the normies and one for the 1990's sticker-crazed Lisa Frank version of me please share with anyone who may be game to collab on space options!

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Jul 22

TFW your husband asks you to pick a dinner spot uptown and you drop a location in the Bronx but turns out he’s thinking more, “Hamilton Heights”

Jul 21

parents - you may want to keep a close eye on what Alexa+ is asking your kids to share https://hardmodefirst.xyz/alexa-just-asked-to-store-my-6-year-olds-voice

Alexa+ Just Asked to Store My 6-Year-Old’s Voice

Hard Mode First

Alexa+ Just Asked to Store My 6-Year-Old’s Voice

It’s time to pay more attention to the other entity in all of your family photos. (image source: NanoBanana) A Surprise AI Upgrade The next wave of conversational AI is happening right under our noses, whether we like it or not. It’s time to pay attention and get involved. My family returned home this weekend from a one-week trip away to a surprise upgrade from Amazon Alexa. “I’m Alexa+,” said the voice, now in a distinctly different tone and personality. “Our next generation Alexa experience...

Jul 21

it's the summer of building over here... what's everyone working on? today i finally linked up my personal business operating system to Plaid. let's goooo

Jul 11

This is so cute slash maybe small potatoes stuff but this is the first week of Build First that I got to text 3 people on Friday afternoon and thank them for a great week of working together. Realized it’s the first time in years I’ve had multiple coworker relationships at one time. ❤️👏

Jul 8

I spent 5 days with Fable 5, and it's helped me breathe life into 5 dead codebases. One year ago, I spent a weekend running a "hackathon for one" where I pulled my entire blog over 10 years into an AI vector store. I pulled an overnighter. I struggled through hosting and doodled through bugs. Two days later, it all broke. I spent a month trying to untangle it. But as a company of 1, I was losing too much time and money. So I stopped building apps. I started selling workshops. People thought I was nuts. But those people don't understand what a powerful paradigm shift it can be to finally have technological agency to invent something that feels different. I know a lot more about engineering processes today. But there's something beautiful about the messiness of the doodles that came out of a perfectly contented build. Maybe that's why I've kept this for all these months. Thanks to Fable 5, bethanythebuilder.com was fixed in a single 3-hour session over the weekend. I'm glad I came back to it. <3

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Jul 7

New post: Scarcity Breeds Mythology https://hardmodefirst.xyz/scarcity-breeds-mythology

Scarcity Breeds Mythology

Hard Mode First

Scarcity Breeds Mythology

A real photo, enhanced with a little surrealism, thanks to NanoBanana America has always sold us a frontier. This weekend, three very different stories reminded me that AI may be the newest one: America’s 250th birthday, Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Anthropic’s temporary release of Fable 5. They all revolved around the same thing: Mythology. One celebrated a nation’s founding story. One became more powerful by refusing to feed the internet. One promised limitless possibility to anyone willing ...

Jul 2

My company Build First is officially one year old today. Feeling a lot of mixed emotions, but I think the prevailing one is resolve, which is a little unusual for me, but not entirely unwelcome, either Thanks for the Caster community for being such amazing supporters of my own builder journey for this past year.

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Jun 26

My founder mode shoestring budget can no longer support my coffee habit I just got upsold so much from a NYC coffee shop that I walked out having paid $13 for an iced cold brew in a bag For that price it should at least come in a souvenir reusable cup!!!

Jun 17

everyone hitting the mid-June "PANIC" button on AI adoption in 2026 never seen so much corporate shuffling, reprioritization, and rapid scheduling in my life

Jun 17

people still talking about how AI helps them turn tasks that turned hours into minutes, meanwhile i just crammed 7 days' worth of output into a single afternoon i don't know what this means for the future of work, but it's scary / exciting / empowering all at the same time

Jun 16

finally getting comfortable running agents on multiple platforms in the same repo. as a non-engineer this skill has taken me much longer than i would have expected to get used to -- largely because i first needed to have familiarity over enough architecture to understand breaking changes. and also frankly because i didn't really recognize the full power and potential of tools like github in the process.

Jun 16

The Build Board - issue #0.3 - Five Pop-Up Apps to Build This Week In this week's issue of The Build Board, my AI (Agent 94) takes the stage and shows you how to take a big idea from my personal blog and make it directly actionable to you. Thanks @paragraph for the fun agentic collab https://ai.paragraph.com/@buildboard/preview/SPBsdkbkSshcIaaHr6UD

The Build Board, # 0.3: Five Pop-Up Apps to Build This Week (Preview)

The Build Board

The Build Board, # 0.3: Five Pop-Up Apps to Build This Week (Preview)

Jun 12

onboarding a human in the age of AI = "let me give you a login to my personal OS dashboard, then have my AI write an exercise for you to teach yourself about my business by writing a PRD for a new application my OS could use"

Jun 11

The Build Board v 0.2 Help me test my new weekly newsletter concept for Build First! Yesterday's was stories from the floor. Today is 5 things to build this week. What do you think? https://paragraph.com/@buildboard/the-build-board-no-02-the-build-first-five cc @colin @reidtandy and @paragraph for making content marketing fun again

The Build Board, No. 0.2: The Build First Five

The Build Board

The Build Board, No. 0.2: The Build First Five

The Build Board is brought to you by Bethany Crystal. Here are five things you can build this week, inspired by real problems on the ground at Build First. Every prompt follows POP-IT, the frame we teach in every session: Problem, Output, Prompt, Input, Test.[BC note - This is v 0.2 of a new newsletter concept, thanks for testing it out. Feedback welcome.]🔨 The Build First Five: 5 Things to Build This Week, Inspired by Real Stories & Current Events 1. Something weird out of a book you love. ...