Hello Full Stack PMs!
Welcome to the first ever Weekly Stack, where I give you all the latest developments relevant to PM builders.
Please let me know what you think! Is this helpful, informative, or at least entertaining? Either way, and especially if it’s none of those, feel free to reply directly to this email to let me know. I read & respond to every message.
Without further ado… it was a good week for builders. OpenAI shipped GPT-5 and learned better benchmarks don't mean happier users, Anthropic quietly made Claude capable of eating entire codebases, and some great industry reports found we crossed a historic milestone in the mobile app space (because of AI).
Let's do this.
🔧 New AI capabilities for builders
GPT-5: Ignore the drama, focus on the money
Yes, the internet exploded with "GPT-5 is horrible" threads and Sam Altman had to bring back GPT-4o within 24 hours. Here’s the full story just with headlines:
But as builders, here's what actually matters:
This puts OpenAI exactly at Google levels, getting rid of Google’s biggest advantage. OpenAI just reclaimed the performance-per-dollar throne.
If you want to go deep, OpenAI released a GPT-5 prompting guide because the new ChatGPT is a bit… weird, with it’s own quirks and new knobs: reasoning_effort, verbosity . I highly recommend you try OpenAI’s prompt optimizer – paste your prompt, it applies best practices, you review the suggestions, and save it as a Prompt Object to use elsewhere.
And if you want to go really deep, here’s GPT-5’s leaked system prompt and a beautiful analysis.
Claude's 1M token context: Impressive but let's be real
Sonnet 4 now supports 1 million tokens – that's 75,000+ lines of code or 750,000 words (several books). This update specific targets “entire project” reads.
While this is a nice win if you like coding with Sonnet, Google's Gemini has had 2 million token context for months. And models still struggle with needle-in-haystack at scale. Just because you CAN dump your entire codebase doesn't mean the model will effectively use all that context.
🎨 AI UX & product design
Google Finance becomes an AI canvas. You chat in the control plane, AI manipulates the canvas. It’s the same pattern everywhere, with different tooling. We're not escaping chat anytime soon.
Wearables = context engineering. Envision + Solos announced Ally Solos smart glasses for blind/low-vision users, using any AI model. The ultimate context engineering problem – how can you give AI the right information at right when a person needs it? Wearables are the answer.
Wikipedia’s war on AI slop. Wikipedia’s community added a “speedy deletion” path for obvious AI-slop pages. It’s an epic example of human in-the-loop system design at massive scale.
📈 Industry trends
McKinsey: AI really is huge. Their 2025 Technology Trends Outlook (that’s a a direct link so you don’t have to give your email 🤭) bundles applied AI, gen-AI, and MLOps as one mega-trend and flags agentic AI making bounds far ahead of any other technology.
Mobile monetization’s historic flip. SensorTower’s Q2 Digital Market Index found that, for the first time EVER, non-gaming apps out-earned games globally. AI-powered software categories lead this growth. Premium AI features are now mainstream revenue drivers. The model that’s working:
Free AI features with strict limits
Hit rate limits at peak usage
$20/month subscription (everyone copied ChatGPT)
50-70% conversion for power users
a16z is in talks to raise a $20B AI megafund. It’s one of the largest funds ever. Whether or not you think we're in a bubble, the capital is being DEPLOYED. It’s likely to keep flowing into later-stage AI companies.
🤖 AI in culture
“Clanker” is my favorite new slur. A Star-Wars-born slur for robots is suddenly a catch-all jab at AI. A US senator used it while pitching a “talk to a person” bill.
It’s a strange new world. r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit went into complete meltdown over GPT-5's personality changes. These aren't edge cases anymore – they're a significant user segment PMs will need to consider. The UX of AI companions optimizes for maximum attachment through constant availability, infinite patience, perfect memory, and zero judgment.
why is this?
— #taoki (#@justalexoki)
5:07 PM • Aug 11, 2025
😄 Meme of the week
Honestly, the real graph from OpenAI’s actual presentation was a meme itself.
And of course the internet had a lot of fun with it:
📚 Other good reads & listens
Inside ChatGPT (Nick Turley) — Essential listen for understanding how OpenAI thinks about product They priced Plus at $20/month based on a Discord survey, and that "ugly" model picker dropdown was intentional friction to see what users really wanted. (Lenny's Podcast)
Teresa Torres on discovery in the AI age — Some fantastic examples of how companies are using AI in practice to help with product discovery, with one of the subject’s real pioneers. (Product Growth Podcast)
Can coding agents self-improve? — An incredible breakdown of how we can help AI coding agents help themselves. (Latent Space)
A Kentucky town tried AI — Shows what happens when you strip politics from civic discourse. Bowling Green ran AI-assisted town halls and found surprising consensus when partisan labels were removed. There's a civic tech opportunity here for anyone brave enough to tackle it. (Gizmodo)
🥞 The Last Pancake
If you only have 15 minutes this week: paste one of your prompts into OpenAI's Prompt Optimizer and see what it suggests. You’ll learn a lot.
Lets keep building,
Carl
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