Last week, we were away on our company offsite as we embarked on the journey to become AI-native. The current goal state is:

For any task, can it first of all be given to AI to complete for you

I take the David William Silva view that LLMs likely won’t be the singularity answer. There is just too much devolving to the baseline and average involved in them. Getting exceptional results from AI today really requires exceptional expertise.

That’s not to undermine their power – on the contrary, that is their power. But understanding how to maximise it is the game. And that for us at Ballpoint is what this next quarter is about: let’s go as close to 100% AI as possible, so we can understand explicitly where the LLMs help us the most and where our position and view is tantamount.

Amongst all of this, the concept of taste keeps returning.

I imagine a world one day into the future where we have weekly internal seminars reviewing essays of note that help deepen our thinking. I imagine an apprenticeship approach to learning.

On one of the cooking shows once, I heard a Michelin star chef say that in their kitchen you’d spend days and days and days learning how to slice an onion. And until you had become an expert at it, you couldn’t advance beyond it. I’m sure there will be approaches to learning skills that reflect that.

Our offsite last week was day zero of this journey. Everyone spent two days in the command line and cursor. The excellent Leo Ubbiali led our primary session: getting everyone in best practice mode. And then my friend and ex-colleague Paul Connor talked us through how AI has empowered his side projects, including new game Phrazy.

I hope you enjoy your long weekends.

Josh

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Key image of the week

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta launches Adaptive Ranking Model (ARM) [Meta Ads] – Meta upgraded its ads algorithm this week with tests in Q4 showing 3% improvements to conversions. This adds ‘LLM-level complexity’ to the ads algo to better serve more relevant ads.

• Meta launches its Ranking Engineer Agent [Meta Ads] – this doubles model accuracy and improves rollout speed of ad model tests. This ‘compresses weeks of manual work into hours.’

• Trialling new Meta features [Meta Ads] – we’ve been testing Meta’s new creative testing tool, as well as flexible ads for a while – and this week shared learnings from them. Key one: Flexible Ads proved to be 2x worse CPA than equivalent ads in ad set tests.

• Oracle laid off 30,000 employees [AI] – joining big changes across Block, Meta, Amazon and more this year.

• Claude’s codebase got leaked on Tuesday [AI] – sparking a big discussion about unreleased features. ‘Buddy’ their own tamagotchi seems to have been released overnight.

The Stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and watch this weekend.

📝 Your marriage has a third. After Babel
📺 The Thinking Game Documentary on Demis Hassabis. YouTube
📝 The robot training for the Olympics. Digital Native
📝 Facts and fights for the moral high ground. Behavioural Scientist
📝 World models. Not Boring
🎧 What is Twitter’s legacy, 20 years later?. The Atlantic
📝 Cryptos true believers demand to be taken seriously. Vanity Fair

What do you think?

Please leave feedback and a comment on the format. This is a newly launched feature this year and we’re always looking to improve. If you like it, hit reply, leave a comment, like us on substack, forward to a friend and all other needy call to action requests you can usually expect at the end of these posts.

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I’m testing times we deliver this weekly aggregate roundup. Let me know what you think of the Saturday delivery.

Context and experience are becoming the most valuable skills in AI.

But something else we all need to learn is perseverance.

If you tell Claude to connect to an Ads MCP and ask it for recommendations, it’s going to tell you to increase brand search because of the mega ROAS. There are those who see that as a sign of AI’s failure and stop.

If you prompt Nano Banana with a basic prompt, you get something OK but still looks like AI. But if you spend eight hours refining, you’ll produce something lifelike.

It takes work to keep trying.

People who play video games know this. They know the feeling of relentless repeating the same thing over and over, getting more and more frustrated only to finally have a breakthrough.

Software engineers know this. Problem-solvers know this. Big problems require so much work that is essentially failing over and over. And we need to persevere through it.

And AI is that challenge writ large.

As it currently stands, AI is pretty bad at replacing like for like work. Yes you can get 80% of a result in 1/10th of the time. But that last 20% is where all the value in the world is created.

But what AI is exceptional at is, with the same level of input time, your output scales 10x more.

It’s not ‘turning an 8 hour task into 1 hour’ it’s ‘if I used those same 8 hours, I can do the job of 100 hours.’

But getting there requires perseverance.

I hope you have a great weekend.

Josh

Key stat

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta had a large outage on Monday [Meta Ads] – The X rumourmill is putting it down to Meta rolling out its new attribution system. One of the reported problems was huge overspends in cost controlled campaigns. We’re not seeing it too much in our (mostly UK-centric accounts), but keep an eye out.

• How to diagnose any growth problem [growth] – I shared my framework this week for how I diagnose growth problems and prioritise them with a revision on the old ICE framework.

• Playwright CLI version is way more token efficient [AI] – many of us are already using playwright instead of the default claude code browsing function, but I recommend an upgrade to the playwright CLI version. This is considerably more token efficient in most use cases.

• Meta is adding a 2% tax on UK ad spend [Meta Ads] – for every UK advertiser, you’re about to see Meta CAC go up by 2%. They’re adding taxes across Europe related to taxes being bestowed on them. Update your financial plans soon.

The Stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and watch this weekend.

📝 The Science of why AI still can’t write like you. Every
📝 It’s strictly business: the enduring allure of mafiosi in culture. Economist (£)
📝 Don’t make a meal out of your business lunch. Monocle
📝 Is Britain ready for US-style religious politics? FT (£)
📝 An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang About Accelerated Computing. Stratechery
📝 The salaries of 60 New Yorkers. New York Magazine (£)
🎧 Outliers: JW Marriott: Building an empire without a master plan. Farnham Street

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In SF, AI billboards were everywhere. As well as making it seem like the entire economy there was AI-focused, it also acted as a good reminder of forgotten launches.

Even brands we’ve already signed up for, we forget about quickly. If your product use isn’t daily or weekly at worst, then you risk being forgotten. If your product frequency is monthly or less, then you need constant ways to remain front of mind.

I’ve written about LTV debt in the past, the notion that brands invest so heavily in acquisition that they end up with an unbalance on the other side of the fence. I’ve seen firsthand brands who have managed to nail an acquisition engine – scale spend from £50k/month to £2m, but their LTV profiles remain static.

With the AI billboards this is about something even more dangerous: users churning before they’ve even experienced value.

With potential launch velocity now at 100x what it was before, I feel that activation marketing and advertising will become even more prominent. An acquired user will mean less and less, and with some of the AI CACs I’ve seen that feels pretty dangerous.

I hope you have a great weekend, please share feedback and vibes.

Josh

Key stat

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta changes link-based attribution [Meta Ads] – Until now a “linkclick” on Meta also meant a like or a comment or many other platform-level engagements. That’s changing with a link meaning an outbound click. For anyone who does click-only attribution, expect a bit of a shift. Some studies have shown that likes and comments and saves are actually more impactful for revenue than clicks, so be aware.

• Meta is reportedly banning accounts for using Claude MCP [Meta/AI] - many reports emerged this week on X that accounts are being banned for connecting to Meta via the various MCP servers out there. People inside MCP providers are denying the allegations, but it has certainly spooked many people. A Meta account ban is hard to come back from without account support, so we recommend caution.

• Authenticity and provenance are out, function and lifestyle are in [consumer] – this was my main takeaway when comparing UK and US retail over the last few weeks. As ever US Retail remains miles ahead of UK, though we are catching up.

The Stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and watch this weekend.

📝 Nobody gets promoted for simplicity. Terrible Software
📝 Everybody loses. Vulture (£)
📝 The science of why AI still can’t write like you. Every
📝 How TV learnt to sell itself. Works in Progress
📝 Are we in a smut renaissance? New York Times (£)
🎧 The business of Formula 1. Acquired
📺 Mad Men Revisited: 10 Year Anniversary with Jon Hamm & John Slattery

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I’m Mark, Ballpoint’s new Head of Creative Strategy. My background is as a copywriter (and I basically still think that’s what I am). But something strange has been happening to me at work recently.

A good chunk of my week is spent writing creative briefs for our clients. Once signed off, they are then passed onto graphic designers or video editors who turn my ideas and copy into finished ads. The whole process generally takes a few days.

One important piece of these creative briefs is the visual reference: pictures or videos or other ads that demonstrate the kind of thing I had in mind. It can take me ages to find one that I’m happy with, so I started using AI to make little mockups instead. I made sure to label these as “rough” and “for reference only” so nobody got confused.

Then I started seeing some of my mockups popping up on Instagram. Our creative studio had decided that they were good enough to work with after a few tweaks.

What does this mean? Have I transcended strategy? Am I “full stack”? One thing that is for sure is that my design skills haven’t improved. The tools have just got good enough to make that irrelevant.

It does feel like the bottleneck in creative is shifting from production to thinking. Soon, the hardest part won’t be making the ad; it will be knowing which ad to make and why. None of which is to say that designers and editors become less valuable. If anything, when anyone can produce something passable, teams who can produce something excellent matter more than ever.

Anyway, here’s what caught our eye this week.

Key Stat

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta embeds Manus into Ads Manager [Meta Ads / AI] – Meta’s $2bn AI agent acquisition is now being quietly rolled out into Ads Manager. Unlike tools that just make suggestions, Manus executes multi-step tasks like campaign analysis, creative briefs and performance reports, all with minimal human direction. Worth watching closely.

• Agency headcount is falling (and AI hasn’t even landed yet) [Industry / AI] – The IPA’s annual Agency Census: open roles down 41%, graduate recruitment down 56%. As Josh wrote in this week’s essay on becoming AI-native, the cuts are happening in anticipation of AI, not because of it.

• We appear to have hit peak Greggs [Consumer] –Total sales rose 6.8% to £2.15bn but pre-tax profit fell to £167m, with like-for-like growth slowing to just 1.6% in early 2026. Shares are down 25% in a year, partly on fears that GLP-1 drugs are killing demand for sausage rolls. If the UK’s most beloved value brand is feeling it, it says something about where the consumer is right now.

The Stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and watch this weekend.

📝 The tension between scale and discretion. The Stanza (£)
📝 The death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete. The Artist Economy
📺 5 OpenClaw agents run my home, finances, and code. Jesse Genet
📝 How De-Yan is shaping the future of brand experience. Creative Review (£)
📝 The Data Centers Have Arrived at the Edge of the Arctic Circle. Wired (£)
📝 Chupa Chups ‘final boss’ in new wrapper launch. Creative Review (£)
📝 What It Takes to Make Good Decisions: Judgment, Not Calculation. Behavioural Scientist

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40 years ago computing made the permanent shift away from the command line to graphical user interfaces (Windows, MacOS). I still remember my first computer, a Windows 95 machine, booted into MS-DOS before it loaded the graphical operating system.

And from then on, it’s felt like GUIs were just the permanent default.

The last week I’ve been increasingly using Wispr Flow. At home, I probably only type half the time I did before. And even in the office, I’m starting to dictate and narrate more than write.

Wispr Flow (Get a month free) is by far most powerful feeding prompts into Claude. Claude feels particularly intuitive at deciphering stream of consciousness. As opposed to using Wispr Flow to dictate emails or Slack messages for example, where often I find I need to add an extra layer for formatting/tone.

Is the future world one where computers are there effectively as command lines and voice commands? Or in reality is computer use actually just going to decrease in general?

I also do worry about the impact this has on using your brain. As I’ve written before, I am a true believer that writing helps you think. And while I’m loving AI’s efficiency gains, if this creates brain rot it’s a serious consideration.

Next week, my colleagues Ryan and Mark will be taking over the reigns. As ever, please share feedback. This is a new format and we want to know. Huge thanks to Maddie and Steve for feedback on the last issue.

We’re currently hiring:

• Head of Growth with paid social specialism (£70-90k)

• PPC Manager (£50-60k)

• Data Engineer & Analyst (£50-60k)

Reply if you want more info.

Have a great weekend,

Josh

Key stat

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Sydney Sweeney is back at American Eagle reminding us ‘comment sections are not customers’ [Marketing strategy] – amid all the fury, backlash, and counter-backlash last year, American Eagle’s sales rose 6% to $1.4bn in Q3. Every talking ahead said it was a disaster, but the numbers tell a different story. Last week, Sydney Sweeney rang the bell at the NYSE cementing their partnership. A good reminder not to get too swept up in the online if what you’re doing is true your own brand values.

• We tested the 103 year old Claude Hopkins theory of specificity [Meta Ads / Psychology / Copywriting] this week – and discovered that it still holds true. If you want one simple edit to do to your ads today: read them back and make any claim or promise hyper specific. You’re not reducing market size, you’re improving CPA.

• Protein continues to rise [Health / product strategy] – protein had a great 2025 rising 4.6% in grocery sales, but 2026 looks set to be even greater. The nutrient gap of GLP-1 users is part of the reason, but so too is the new found strength-focused health kick as we reported in our 2026 forecast. In the most elite circles, skinniness is no longer the status single du jour: being strong is.

• Podcasts can take 5.5 months to show their full impact if you’re a high consideration product [Measurement] – Haus’ Olivia Kory shared this excellent graphic for how long your incrementality window should run for depending on channel and consideration.

The stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and listen to this weekend.

🎧 ‘Keely Hodgkinson’s Insane Year’ High Performance Podcast
📝 ‘The Annual Letter | Palantir Technologies’ The Annual Letter
📝 It turns out you can live a Huel-only diet. Book review by Felicity Lawrence, FT (£).
📝 ’Should I dress like my younger co-workers?’ Vanessa Friedman, New York Times (£)
📝 ’Why Ruggable’s Lauren Sherman is focused on resetting the balance of brand and performance marketing’. Anna Hansel, Modern Retail
📝 ’Why AI companies are suddenly worried about theft’ John Hermann. NY Mag (£)
📝 ’The evolution of advertising in China’. Eliza Williams, Creative Review (£)
📝 ’Velocity is the new authority’. Om Malik
📺 ’Meet the student with no teachers, no homework, just AI’ Every Podcast

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I first got a computer when I was eight years old in 1996. I spent hours on that thing, playing around with every nook and cranny of that Windows 95 shell. Briefcase, Publisher, the Registry. There was no stone unturned.

Four years later, I got the internet and built my first PC. An old friend from primary school emailed me to tell me he’d coded a website in HTML. I was jealous and felt stupid. And so I went and bought a book on HTML and spent every spare hour after school and on the weekends learning to build my own. A month later, I discovered View sourcecode and learnt that he’d built it in a website generator. I’d been hoodwinked, but I was hooked on the internet.

12 years after that and I’m in my first job and amazed that I get to do stuff with the internet for a living. Facebook, Foursquare, Livejournal. We’re now connected properly and more widely. It’s not just me and the other internet weirdos in IRC rooms.

And now it’s today. After spending three hours a day on Claude Code for a fortnight, I’ve never been as excited to use a computer, nor as anxious and uncertain as to what that means for all of us.

The mad thing is that the stuff that eight year old me was excited about on that first PC, I could probably vibe code in half an afternoon. Can’t help but wonder where we’ll be in another two decades.

Key stat

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• It’s time to become generalists [Careers] – Marc Andreesen said there’s a Mexican standoff now that PMs, designers, and engineers could all do each other’s jobs. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code said what we all need to do now is to “try to be a generalist.” I wrote about this last year when I said ’it’s time we all became growth artisans’.

• Why marketing calendars are for the brand that have already made it [Consumer / Meta] – with Meta you have a set number of shots on goal you can take each month. If you’re doing less than £2.5m of revenue, then whatever you do don’t start filling those marketing calendar events.

• Meta’s ‘test-inside-an-adset’ tool is being pushed hard [Meta Ads] – since last October, you’ve been able to test creative inside a scaling campaign. But it’s being heavily pushed this year. We’re running a dozen tests on this as we speak, and we’ll be reporting back in a few weeks with the findings.

• eBay is buying Depop from Etsy for $1.2bn [Consumer] – eBay is worried about younger consumers and so has bought the fashion marketplace from Etsy.

• The end of ‘super-sized’ in the US may be upon us [Consumer] – with everyone from KFC and Olive Garden to high-end restaurants slimming down their portion sizes. The reason is two-fold: GLP-1s and cost of living. Though we must remember the affordability crisis is misunderstood.

The stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and listen to this weekend.

🎧 ‘Fame is not a business model’. Operators
📝 ‘Dr. Peter Attia steps down from David Protein after Epstein links’ Reuters
🎧 ‘Neuroscience of why we crack under pressure.’ NPR
📝 ’How to solve any problem.’ George Mack / High Agency
📝 ’Don’t ban teenagers from social media.’ Economist (£)
📝 ’Why Nudge Policies Failed’ Rob Wolfe, The Atlantic
📝 ’What Olympic branding teaches us about emotional design’ Creative Review (£)
📺 ’Google DeepMind chief warns AI investment looks ‘bubble-like’ FT Interview

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Welcome to Aggregate #001. I’m giving the Substack a serious upgrade this year.

Every Tuesday – as you have done for the last three years – you’ll get my usual essay.

This is a seven minute read sitting under one of these six core themes: founder mindset, paid social, growth stories, data & insights, creative & psychology, and growth frameworks.

But in addition, I’ll also send out Aggregate every Friday.

Aggregate is for consumer founders and senior operators to catch up on everything they missed going into the weekend. It’s a bit more magaziney, I’m going to link out to other stuff you should be reading, and there’ll be just a short viewpoint each week of something that’s on my mind.

Please leave comments, hit reply, let me know what you think.

Josh

Margin

A single viewpoint of the week.

Authenticity is now a scarce commodity.

Portrait mode has ruined bokeh in photography just as ChatGPT has ruined the em dash. AI will soon do the same to high beauty in film and video.

Last month, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote about this — but also pointed out something hiding in plain sight:

“…but the primary way people share, even photos and videos, is in DMs. That content is unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences. Think shoe shots and unflattering candids.”

British founders skew older, and the people in charge of creating brands are often those who grew up with Instagram as a place of aesthetic perfection. But it’s not just Gen Z who use it differently now. We all do. Open your DMs to your partner. Look at the last 10 things you shared. How many are polished? How many are beautiful? My bet is less than zero.

Unpolished ads is no longer just a nice-to-have, its increasingly the dominant and maybe only way to win on paid. And if Mosseri’s post is anything to go by, he doesn’t expect the rest of Instagram to shift any time soon.

If you need some ad inspo, get out of the glossies, and open up your DMs.

Key stat

The most interesting stat I’ve seen this week.

Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Creative Testing within Ad Sets [Meta] – this one has been in a few of our ad accounts since last October, but we’re hearing a lot about it from various corners now. Upsides are: you can keep a winner in the hero without any disruption to learning. Downsides are you’re capped at 5 creatives per week.

• 2026 the year of peptides? [Consumer] – peptides are surging amongst the US tech and biohacking communities being used for everything from injury recovery, performance, mental function, anti-ageing, and sleep. Ozempic falls into this category, but it’s broadening fast.

• How awareness spend can help you triple your revenue [Meta] – We launched our first report of 2026 this week on going full funnel on Meta. So far we spy downloads from Harrys, Popsa, Coat, Wild Dose, and Ffern. If you’ve hit a ceiling and creative isn’t working anymore, then maybe this is for you.

• OpenAI ads rollout has begin [Platforms] – The most hyped new ad product of the year launches today. This is a CPM-only model, and currently invite-only. The best ad platforms improve products because they force the user into the discussion. But there are also plenty of examples of bad ad platforms. The question currently though is who is still using ChatGPT?

• The ‘economy of loneliness’ creates AI boyfriends [Consumer] – while in most of the world, it’s men using AI to generate girlfriends, in China, there is a surge of professional gen z and millennial women using it the other way round. This is just one service targeting this market, as reports the FT.

The stack

A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and listen to this weekend.

📚 A group of TikTokers tried to detox their timelines. New York Times (£)
📚 The Stack Above The Cloud. Nfx
📚 Ryan Serhant – The Definitive Profile Behind ‘Owning Manhattan’. The Profile
🎧 How Cognitive Biases Work. Stuff You Should Know
🎧 Kara Swisher. Longform #271. (Archival)
📚 What Kills Cartels. The Diff

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