Bethany Crystal | Paragraph

Bethany Crystal | Paragraph

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

Embedded content

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.

Embedded content

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. ...

Jun 10

Issue #0.1 of The Build Board - your weekly peek at what's going on under the hood at Build First, and what you can build next (made via @paragraph, cc @colin and @reidtandy!) Any thoughts or reactions to this format? What would make it more useful or interesting to you? https://paragraph.com/@buildboard/the-build-board-issue-01-we-built-apps-out-of-shakespeare

The Build Board, Issue #0.1: We Built Apps Out of Shakespeare

The Build Board

The Build Board, Issue #0.1: We Built Apps Out of Shakespeare

Welcome to The Build Board.I'm Bethany Crystal, and I run Build First. Over the past year I've convened 2,000+ people through AI sessions and workshops, hosted hacker-house-style build nights, and spent most of my time in rooms full of people learning to build things they didn't think they could. Before Build First I worked in venture capital, at startups, at nonprofits, and in crypto. But my throughline has always been the same: the best way to learn something is to build it, with other peop...

Jun 10

hey i'm looking for some beta testers for a new AI-enabled newsletter i'm working on for Build First. basically, i want some subscribers to share what you think about the content, if it feels human, and how it's landing for you... anyone game to be added to a small distro list?

Jun 8

Lost a deal that hurt a little today. Turned the rejection into a song. Feel a little bit better, hehe. https://suno.com/s/oHETxA51W8vbbVgp

We Wish You All the Best

We Wish You All the Best

Listen and make your own on Suno.

Jun 8

I wrote a post today reflecting a bit on the important role of fandom across a number of levels (and why it's important to keep showing up, even when your team loses) https://hardmodefirst.xyz/winning-and-losing-the-crucial-role-of-fandom

Winning and Losing: The Crucial Role of Fandom

Hard Mode First

Winning and Losing: The Crucial Role of Fandom

Orange and Blue and the Brink of HopeNew York City is on fire right now. To be clear, that fire is orange and blue. For the first time in the 15 years that I’ve lived here, walking around the city feels like walking around a college campus. It feels like one out of every five people is wearing orange and blue for the New York Knicks, who haven’t made it to the NBA finals in 27 years. On the Upper West Side, the black and white cookies at Fairway have turned orange and blue. The bagels at Koss...

Jun 6

In my New York era

Embedded content

Jun 4

Hey New York Knicks fans -- I made you a song today: "Steel in San Antonio" https://suno.com/s/4pLaYfBXqKwyU5Ye

"Steel in San Antonio"

"Steel in San Antonio"

Listen and make your own on Suno.

Jun 2

as it turns out, working with AI's almost exclusively for the past year or so has made me a giant PITA to have as a human colleague, AMA

Jun 1

I had to send my first ever cybersecurity incident report today (to my block association board). First time I’ve ever been the one to identify, triage, and mitigate the threat on my own! All in all a pretty minor incident but it was still a good at-bat to run it to the ground.

May 31

oh god, even my AI's are realizing that I have such high standards that when i do compliment them on their work, it "means a lot"

Embedded content