A few weeks ago, we introduced our new AI courses. We are closing access to these on Wednesday 20th May. If you want to join either course option, you’ll need to join before the end of Wednesday.

The goal?

Why learn Claude Code?

Making the move from AI as a chatbot to AI as a working agent for you is the most important change you can make this year.

But using the core Claude desktop products, or Cowork, both have severe limitations.

Claude Code allows you to have control over a much greater degree of what you build.

If you want more of an understanding of what’s possible, read this article I wrote on 15 Claude Skills that have changed our agency.

Join our courses today

Who is this for?

This is for any senior leader, project owner, or founder who is non-technical. If you’re already in Claude Code, then this is not for you.

This is helping people make the jump from the comfort of their core setups into the seemingly-scary world of the command line.

We’ll teach you how to do it safely, what to look out for, with loads of foundational knowledge to learn as well.

Purchase before Wednesday

Two learning options: (1) in-person, one day deep dive or (2) 8 week online course

Over the last two months at Ballpoint, I have put together a curriculum that has helped upskill our entire team. This is what is becoming our 8-week course.

However, I also know that the nothing beats in person and a dedicated day to really get stuck into things. That’s why we also have two options for workshops.

We are only going to run two of these workshops.

The first is this Friday (22nd May) and the second is Friday 5th June. After this we will not run anymore.

Sign up today

We are only going to do the full course if we can get 20 people to sign up to it.

We’re setting a deadline of this Wednesday to make payments, and will make decisions on Thursday if we go ahead with it.

If we choose not to go ahead with the course, we will fully refund the payments this week.

Buy the course today

Hello to our many new subscribers. This week’s post on 15 ways Claude has changed our business went a little bit viral. 👋

As a heads up for you. Our usual cadence is a weekly Tuesday essay and a weekend lighter snack. I like to think of this as FT Weekend for startup, DTC, and consumer growth people.

April is coming to an end, which for most of you – based on our recent seasonality analysis we did – I imagine is a good sign. We’re seeing more and more brands move up the funnel in their marketing efforts in times like this, and of course a shift towards partnership ads.

I don’t know about you, but Claude’s felt disappointing this week, and yesterday’s news that they’ve pushed some bigger edits is maybe a welcome sign. That said, yesterday I kicked off experiments with Codex – and that was before last night’s drop of gpt-5.5. I’m dual testing workflows today, will see how I get on.

I hope you have a great weekend
Enjoy
Josh

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Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta’s AI creative tools are creating trust issues [Meta Ads] - Those of us in the weeks of ad accounts know that Meta’s AI auto-optimisations are a bane, but this has now reached bigger marketing news. Marketing Brew reported that some advertisers have struggled to switch off Meta’s AI creative features, with ads altered in ways that made products look wrong or visibly AI-generated. Snag Tights said Meta’s tools modified creative without the brand’s knowledge.

• AI referrals are becoming a commerce channel [DTC / Ecommerce] - Adobe says traffic from AI sources to US retail sites grew 393% year-on-year in Q1. In March, AI traffic also converted better than non-AI traffic, after being meaningfully worse a year earlier. The caveat is that the absolute base may still be small, but the direction is obvious: product pages now need to be legible to humans, Google and LLMs.

• Thorne shows the return of brand-led DTC growth [DTC] - Modern Retail wrote about Thorne driving 63% DTC sales growth after a brand awareness push. The interesting move is that a supplements business is not just trying to win on information, despite being in a research-heavy category. It is moving toward aspiration, community and authority. In other words: performance is being rebuilt on brand.

• AI in fashion points to the human layer becoming the luxury layer [AI / Consumer] - Vogue’s piece on AI in fashion argues that luxury is likely to use AI behind the scenes, while keeping the human as the interface. This feels relevant beyond luxury. In a world of agentic commerce, the brands that feel human will stand out precisely because everything else is becoming easier to automate.

  ---

  The Stack

  A shortlist of things to read, watch and visit this weekend.

  🎧 Is AI going to turn us all into middle managers?. The Atlantic
  📝 142 things you need to know in consumer growth in 2026. Early Stage Growth
  📝When your digital life vanishes. New Yorker
  🎧 The science of why you hate small talk. NPR
  📝 What I learnt about Jeff Bezos’ billionaire retreat. The Atlantic

  📝 Where should your beauty brand be after 10 years?. Vogue Business

  📝 Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to in April. Wallpaper

  📝 Five tables to book this spring. Monocle
  📺 You are the bottleneck in AI. Andrej Karparthy on No Priors
  📝 Sam Altman may control our future, can he be trusted. New Yorker

  ---

  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.

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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