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Tyler Howarth retweeted
I'm very happy with my hybrid @bot + @cursor_ai workflow for managing internal @macstoriesnet apps.
Here's how it works, along with a few tips.
It's an always-on (cloud-based), self-testing setup that I've been (mostly) driving from my phone for nearly two months. And it has made us way faster for articles and admin tasks.
This is very much inspired by @poteto's excellent /pstack skills and tips (the interview with @mattpocockuk is a must-watch) and it's a series of techniques that fundamentally resonate with me and how my brain operates.
I started 2026 with a goal: I just want to write and record podcasts; I don't want to be dragged down by inefficient tools anymore. So I created a series of web services for us, initially built with Codex, then redesigned by Fable in June. We've stress-tested these for months, including during WWDC and the Apple September event.
Some notes:
- I've created custom tools for our CDN, Apple Newsroom analysis and extraction, article search with @voyageai rerankers, Notion Markdown export and proofreading, and more. Millions of people have read articles that were written by @johnvoorhees and me, but managed via these tools.
- There are outer and inner loops. The outer loop is @bot coordinating different bots and threads per-app. Each app gets its own thread, and the primary bot orchestrates across them.
- The inner loop is a Cursor project. These are similar to Claude's new projects in that they're cloud based, there's a coordinator, and everything runs in a cloud VM. Inside a project, agents (with different models, like Opus for UI work) can work on different parts of our MacStories tools.
- AFAIK only Cursor's projects support setting env secrets (Claude can only set API credentials in Projects, bummer). This allows agents to build and run the apps in their cloud sandbox, test them with real data, and it lets the QA bot come in and validate.
- The parallelization of tasks is where @bot shines right now with multiple bots and threads weaving feedback in and out from a Cursor project. To the best of my knowledge, no other tool makes it this easy right now (I can approximate this with Hermes, but it's a lot of extra work and overhead). I just couldn't do all this with Dots either because it's just one bot.
- I use pstack and verification skills religiously. I want my agents and bots to be constrained to check their work, operate independently, and escalate to me only when needed.
- I can operate all this from…anywhere. I have added features to the apps during walks with voice mode (talk to primary bot, let it coordinate), and I've even kicked off sessions with webhooks from my Pebble ring: macstories.net/club/macstori…
- The system watches itself with routines that scan logs and analytics for errors, hands off to Cursor cloud agents for review, which verify and open PRs
This was a LOT of work to put together, but it works beautifully for us at this point! We're a team of two (plus our designer and dev), but I feel like our output has tripled this year (and the numbers prove it).
I hope we get more options in this space in the future, but for now the Bot + Cursor combo is unmatched.
you should try @bot
→ @bot
hyped to build with an amazing team @pengzheng_ @johnbai @kenneth_kuh @justinjaywang @shampliu @lukebvrker @mamuso @benjitaylor
Tyler Howarth retweeted
Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants.
Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create.
My reflections on the whole thing:
• Though there are clearly selection dynamics afoot, figuring out some route beyond the current aesthetic moment seems to be of wider interest in the art community than I would have guessed. Many applicants described their dissatisfaction with the status quo, some in strong terms. We had to close applications after a few weeks because there were so many.
• It's too early to call it, but it seems that both beauty as an unapologetic goal (contra much that is in modernist and contemporary approaches), and ways to channel pre-modern styles into something new for the present era, are of growing interest.
• The awards made me reflect on the perhaps obvious issue of how hard it must be for an artist to persistently do something new: schools, galleries, buyers, etc., all have structurally embedded preferences as well. These individual awards made me wonder what form supporting new clusters could take.
• Architecture seems to me like the discipline most ripe for new ideas. One correspondent observed: "American architects are somewhat constrained by the association with the academy, in addition to the well known regulation issues. There is a tendency to overthink things so that the designs are formally interesting to someone deep in the conversation, but lacking poetry and magic. There are more firms in Europe, South America and beyond that “just do things” (especially in places where it is easier to build)." This was evident in the submissions.
• AI seems to be making people rethink things in a quite fundamental way, just as urbanization/industrialization/popularization of photography did at the end of the 19th century. For some that will mean interesting new forms of AI-augmented art, but the effects of the rethinking will likely be wider.
• Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.
• There's a lot to know that is not written down, and I'm very grateful to those who have helped and advised me along the way.
can someone id the speakers 🔊
People talk, listen, watch, think, and collaborate at the same time, in real time. We've designed an AI that works with people the same way.
We share our approach, early results, and a quick look at our model in action.
thinkingmachines.ai/blog/int…