The Real Lesson of Firstmate: In the Age of Agents, Build the Tools That Fit You

An L8 principal engineer at Meta quits his job — and instead of launching a startup or raising a fund, he spends a year building wrappers. He wraps the GitHub CLI, Chrome DevTools, Git worktrees and code validation, and writes a tool called gnhf — "goodnight, have fun" — that babysits his coding agents while he sleeps. Stitched together, they became Firstmate, an open-source project that hit 3,000 stars in two months. But in this video, Hal Shin argues that the tool is not the interesting part: the real lesson is what its author understood about building for yourself in the age of AI agents.








In Singapore, researchers have switched on a data center that runs on a different kind of silicon substitute: living human brain cells. The prototype, built at the NUS Life Sciences Institute by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine) together with global data center developer and operator DayOne and Melbourne-based biological computing startup Cortical Labs, packs roughly 16 million living human neurons into a single server rack — the world's first independently operated biologically integrated rack.