Hello, dear TEA-mates! Here is what you need to know today.
1. 🎨 Your Moat Is Not the Product, It Is the Next Idea
Invent + Build Studio argues that once AI makes competent execution cheap, a finished product stops being a differentiator. The essay uses the Flash era as its evidence: a clumsy tool that nonetheless triggered a decade of experimentation, with the Flashpoint archive still cataloguing 157,509 preserved Flash works. Today the pattern has flipped. An April 2026 study found that roughly 35% of newly published websites by mid-2025 were AI-generated, and the humans behind them make almost no creative decisions. Competition is rising at the same time: Y Combinator applications grew from 20,000 per batch in 2022 to 27,000 in 2024, and the accelerator moved from two batches a year to four in 2025. The proposed answer is not a nicer color palette but taking a hundred steps back, questioning whether the product needs to work this way at all, and using AI to run more experiments rather than more replicas. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "The true defensible edge is building the habit of continuous invention: re-examining core problems from scratch and testing weird, unproven concepts."
2. ⚖️ Big Law Starts Buying Its Own GPUs
Latham & Watkins, the second-largest US law firm with $8.3bn in revenue last year, has purchased its own Nvidia GPU servers and begun fine-tuning open-weight models in house, the Financial Times reported. It is the first public example of a major law firm owning AI hardware rather than renting it, and the firm leases locked data-centre space that only its own staff can enter. Its machine learning engineers are tailoring Nvidia Nemotron 3 models, which keeps sensitive client material out of any cloud vendor. Chief information officer Rene Mendoza cited both that privacy need and a desire for cost flexibility as AI usage pricing rises. Running a setup like this can cost tens of millions of dollars a year and potentially hundreds of millions as the technology advances. Rivals took the opposite route: Kirkland & Ellis works with Palantir, A&O Shearman with Harvey, and Freshfields signed a deal with Anthropic. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "AI is such a disruptive, revolutionizing technology that it is changing every company, so every company will become an AI company later on, just like how .com got popular."
3. 🧩 The World's Best AI Startups Write Bad Prompts
Wulfie Bain, who leads Applied AI Engineering for OpenAI's startups team across EMEA and APAC, published a guide on why prompts decay inside otherwise excellent companies. His diagnosis is that prompt evolution is accretive: teams only add lines and never remove them, producing thousands-of-lines "spaghetti prompts" full of contradictions and unspecified intent that no one reads end to end. His fix is to treat prompt changes as product changes and prompts as code, splitting them into MECE sections (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) such as Background, Behaviour, and Output, so internal logic stays separate from user-facing formatting. Bain reports that after a couple of days rewriting agents with individual startups he has seen one speed its agents up by 50%, another raise seven-day retention by 40%, and another cut costs by 30%. He also points to a Lovable engineer who cut $20 million a year in LLM spend after his mother spotted inconsistencies and duplication in the prompt. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "A great reminder: prompting is a product of its own. Prompting is the new code."
4. 🎣 Trezor Customers Phished Through a Vendor Nobody Chose
Hardware wallet maker Trezor told customers that Brevo, the marketing company it uses to send newsletters, was breached, letting attackers send roughly 347,000 phishing emails that appeared to come from Trezor. Brevo said the hackers reached 138 accounts by abusing a flaw where their access was "not properly scoped" and was "wrongly granted" across organizations. One phishing subject line read "Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability," and the link installed an app that asked victims for their wallet backup password, which allows irreversible theft of funds. This is the second vendor breach for Trezor in weeks, after shipping partner ShipMonk exposed the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and postal addresses of at least 81,000 buyers. Some of those customers have since received physical letters with QR codes leading to fake wallet pages. Trezor says its own products, wallets, and account system were not affected and that it is reevaluating its vendor relationships. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Here is the thing: no matter how secure you are, if you are leveraging third parties and they get hacked, you get hacked. There is no middle ground. I guess the way to solve it is to own everything end to end, or that will be it. How would you do that?"
5. 🏛️ AI Agents Are Flooding Government Inboxes
Public services are seeing steep jumps in filings as AI makes forms and complaints easy to produce. Complaints to the UK housing ombudsman more than doubled from 2,600 in 2022 to just over 7,000 last year, and the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw five times the complaint volume over the same period, with similar jumps in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions. Researcher Chris Schmitz calls the pattern "agentic flooding" in a paper covering 84 cases across 11 jurisdictions, due to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference. Most cases were flat before 2022, then rose at increasing speed, and few show any sign of slowing. Schmitz stops short of claiming AI is the direct cause, but says the vast majority of new filings come from people who were always entitled to claim and were previously deterred by administrative burden. His argument is that this is the moment to rethink how those processes work rather than treat the extra volume as spam. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: "Maybe the US government needs to level up by upgrading the old system to respond to these complaints."
🛠️ Skill of the Day
The Contradiction Sweep: find the rules that quietly fight each other inside instructions you have been adding to for months.
You are a specification auditor. I will paste a set of standing instructions I keep adding to over time. It may be an AI system prompt, my custom instructions, a team style guide, or an operating procedure.
Instructions: [PASTE THE WHOLE THING]
What it is for: [WHO OR WHAT FOLLOWS THESE, AND THE JOB THEY DO]
What has been going wrong: [THE BEHAVIOUR I KEEP HAVING TO CORRECT]
Read it end to end as a literal reader with none of my background knowledge. Then return:
1. Direct contradictions, quoting both conflicting lines and naming which one a reader would probably follow.
2. Ambiguous rules, where I clearly meant something specific but never said it. For each, ask me the one question that would settle it.
3. Dead rules that no longer apply, or that repeat another line.
4. A regrouped version, organised into sections that do not overlap and together cover everything, with each rule appearing exactly once.
5. A short list of what you removed and why, so I can put anything back.
Do not invent rules I never wrote, and do not smooth over a conflict by picking a side silently.Paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your tool of choice. Run it on the longest instruction block you own, and keep the removal list before you accept the rewrite.
TEAHEE Moment
Stay sharp, stay informed. See you tomorrow.
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