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I built a custom Slack inbox. It was easier than you’d think. | Yash Tekriwal (Clay)

2026-04-08 20:03:47

Yash Tekriwal is the head of education at Clay. A self-described hyper-optimizer, Yash has built multiple custom productivity applications using Perplexity Computer and OpenClaw to manage his overwhelming daily workflow—including a Slack digest system that categorizes over 150 daily notifications into actionable priorities, and a consolidated news/email/Slack dashboard that serves as his personal command center.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

What you’ll learn:

How Yash built a custom Slack digest that categorizes 150+ daily notifications into action-required, need-to-read, and FYI buckets
Why Perplexity Computer beats Claude Code and Codex for building personal productivity apps
His “anti-to-do list” framework: spending an hour daily automating tasks you never want to do again
How to use AI for deterministic tasks (APIs, structured data) vs. subjective tasks (categorization, summarization)
Why the SaaS apocalypse narrative is wrong—and why we’re about to see an explosion of micro-software
How his team uses Perplexity Computer to prototype design systems and communicate with cross-functional partners

Brought to you by:

Guru—The AI layer of truth

ThoughtSpot—Build AI-powered analytics into your product

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Yash

(02:38) The burden of 150 daily Slack notifications

(05:45) When to use AI for tasks vs. building deterministic code

(06:38) Building the Slack digest with OpenClaw

(11:33) Introducing Perplexity Computer and the visual dashboard

(14:28) Three reasons Perplexity Computer beats Claude Code

(16:14) Using connectors to automate meeting follow-ups across Notion and Asana

(18:21) The Kanban-style Slack dashboard

(20:15) The long tail of customer requests and the future of micro-software

(24:09) The anti-to-do list framework

(26:21) Building a consolidated news, email, and Slack digest

(29:48) How Perplexity Computer handles authentication and deployment

(31:46) Team use case: Prototyping persona-based learning journeys for Clay University

(35:49) Lightning round and final thoughts

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Listen: A visual guide to getting out of a creative slump

2026-04-08 10:51:13

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In this episode, my wife Michelle Rial, cartoonist and author, celebrates the launch of her new book Charts for Babies by sharing a pep talk for anyone stuck in a creative rut. She walks through 12 tried-and-tested steps designed to lift you out of a creative block and get back to making things that matter.

Listen now: YouTube | Apple | Spotify

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why it’s necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing
The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start
How to reframe scorn as a positive signal
The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination
How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

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A visual guide to getting out of a creative slump

2026-04-07 20:45:49

👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | My favorite AI/PM courses, public speaking course, and interview prep copilot

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I’m so, so excited to share a guest post by Michelle Rial, my wife! Her first children’s book, Charts for Babies, comes out TODAY, and we thought: what better way to celebrate than collaborating on a post? Below, you get a glimpse into her brilliant mind. This visual guide is both inspiring and useful, and is for anyone trying to create something. Read it right now or bookmark it for the next time you get stuck.

P.S. Michelle’s book is truly great, and makes an excellent gift—but you don’t have to just take my word for it. Renowned child psychologist and parenting coach Dr. Becky said, “Charts for Babies says to your child, ‘I believe you can understand the world’—and that message matters from the very start.” And Booklist said, “Rial’s understanding of her audience and her ability to distill information clearly are gifts, and the whimsical hand-drawn illustrations and text will delight readers.” Grab a copy (or 10) here.

💥 Coming soon to Lenny’s Product Pass: Cursor, Google AI Pro, Notion, Supabase, v0, Gumloop, and Fin

Lenny’s Product Pass is about to get a major upgrade. Over the next few weeks, we’re adding:

A free year of Cursor, Google AI Pro (incl. Gemini), v0, and Supabase for Insider subscribers
A free year of Notion, Fin, and Gumloop for Annual subscribers

This is on top of the 25+ premium products that subscribers already get access to, including a free year of Lovable, n8n, Canva, Manus, Gamma, Granola, ElevenLabs, Factory, Devin, Linear, and Wispr Flow. Learn more here.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, just keep an eye on your inbox—we’ll email you as soon as these new products go live. Not a paid subscriber yet? Now would be a good time to become one so you don’t miss out.

An important note: If you want priority access to the biggest upcoming Product Pass offers, now is the best time to become an Insider. The Insider price will increase from $350 to $400 on April 14. If you’re already an Insider, you’ll keep your current price. If you want to lock in the current Insider price before the next wave goes live, upgrade before April 14.

Are you feeling what I’m feeling? Blink twice with your heavy human eyelids if you are starting to feel like there is no point to creating things anymore. That if robots can do the creative work we spend hours, days, months, or years pulling our hair out over, why should we even try?

Or maybe you’re just in a regular creative drought. The paralysis of worrying that your work isn’t worth doing anymore or that someone (or something) is already doing it better.

Well, it’s time to lift yourself by your Blundstone loops and climb right out of that rut. I’ve made you a visual pep talk.

Each of the following 12 charts I’m about to share was crafted from the inside of one of these hollows. Making them felt like peeking out from underwater before heaving myself out of the sea like a slippery, blubbery walrus, gripping the land and steadying myself with my number 2 pencil-tusks.

I hope that this guide will help you, too. Maybe you’ll be able to hoist your heavy artist soul out of the deep dark ocean, onto a sunny platform where we can all warm our insides together and enjoy some ceviche.

And if any robots are listening, please get back to work on helping me find the cause of my eczema.

1. Be OK with being embarrassing

As a sensitive human, putting work out into the world to be judged can feel excruciating. What if I look “thirsty”? Or worse, what if Gen Z thinks I’m cringe? What if, what if, what IF? It makes me want to pack up my infinity notebooks and quit.

But the people who always end up with something really good? They don’t stop. Maybe they pause or take a rest, but they always come back and keep going. Nobody remembers the project that didn’t get any traction, the one that may have seemed a bit embarrassing at the time. People remember the successes and forget all the attempts.

2. Ignore the algorithm

Are you making work to please the algorithm like it’s your never-satisfied immigrant parent? (Just me?) Well, the algorithm will change, and then you’ll look back and be like: what the hell was that? So instead, try to make things that make YOU laugh, make you tear up, make you spit out your iced matcha latte that is apparently causing your anemia.

3. Use your caffeine wisely

Caffeine can be amazing for creativity . . . until it isn’t. Try not to fall into the trap of squandering your mental alertness on a pile of emails that only needed a simple “sounds good!” What happens then is we don’t make any progress on the juicy stuff, we feel defeated, and we reach for another cup. And then . . .

4. Overwhelmed? Take some breaths.

You might think it’s too early in this process to be overwhelmed, but sometimes staring at a blank page (or at a very full page that you just realized is trash) can feel incredibly overwhelming. And the overwhelm paralyzes you before you can even get going. Especially if you just flew past your caffeine limit.

I highly recommend having a meditation or breathwork practice. The times I’ve been consistent with it have been my most steady and productive times. Unfortunately, today I’m right here with you, panicking that I need to finish this post.

5. Stop thinking about what you’re going to work on and just get started

Yes, your ergonomics should be solid; yes, you need to find quiet or a playlist that helps you focus. But after that, stop stalling and just get started. If you get distracted, start again. Butt in chair.

6. Keep going

And going, and going, and going. The love of the work is the reason you got into this in the first place. Remember that the work is the point, and the struggle is what makes your story interesting. Imagine succeeding at every attempt—you’d need a whole forearm full of mal de ojo bracelets.

7. You can’t control how the work will be perceived

Sure, you can throw your best effort into sharing and promoting your thing. Some people will hate it. Some people hate you and thus hate it. If people hate it, congrats, it’s popular enough to attract scorn. Maybe nobody sees it? Congrats, it’s a hidden gem. Be proud of what you’ve done, share as best you can and as often as you can stomach, and then keep on making and progressing.

8. Rumination is a waste of time

Something I know about the writer of this newsletter is he doesn’t ruminate or get caught up in regret, which may be how he is so mind-blowingly productive. His thought loops? They move forward in a straight line. The only time he looks back is to note how he can do something better in the future. I might try that.

9. Each failed idea creates the potential for new growth

Don’t discount ideas just because they didn’t work right away. Let them grow and sprout in new directions. Put them in your bad-idea pile and let that pile grow and grow until your dining table is covered in bad ideas and you have only a tiny sliver of your table to actually eat on. Come back to those ideas, and see what blossoms into something new and what’s still a goner.

And then clean your dining table, for the love of god!! People LIVE HERE.

10. You’re already further along than you think

If you’re blocked and feeling like you’ve been at something forever and still have nothing, go back and look at your draft pile. I bet you’ll spot some progress.

11. It’s never too late to start

Be the adult leaving your piano lesson as a first grader is arriving. Be the youngest person at your rec center’s water aerobics class. It’s never too late (or too early). You might discover you’re great at something you didn’t know about. Or even better, you might have a blast. The juicy new neural pathways in your brain will thank you.

12. Still feeling it all? “Let it be.”

Did you enjoy this in any small, tiny, pie-chart fraction of a way?

If so, please check out my new children’s book, Charts for Babies! It is OUT TODAY and available wherever you buy your books (it’s also at places like MoMA Design Store and SFMOMA Museum Store!).

It’s my way of introducing the language of math at a very early age, when the brain is at its spongiest.

You can request it from your local library or bookstore, gift it to a new parent (unless they sternly specified NO GIFTS), or get it for the future mathlete in your life!

Thanks, Michelle! Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are group discounts, gift options, and referral bonuses available.

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Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

🎙️ This week on How I AI: I gave Claude Code our entire codebase. Our customers noticed.

2026-04-06 23:03:07

I gave Claude Code our entire codebase. Our customers noticed. | Al Chen (Galileo)

Listen now on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

Brought to you by:

Orkes—The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows

Tines—Start building intelligent workflows today

Al Chen is a field engineer at Galileo who works directly with enterprise customers asking highly technical questions. In this episode, Claire talks with Al about how he uses Claude Code to query Galileo’s entire codebase across 15 repositories, combine it with Confluence and Slack, and deliver accurate, real-time answers without relying on documentation or constantly pinging engineering. They cover why code is often a better source of truth than docs, how to turn customer questions into scalable knowledge, and how AI is changing what customer-facing teams can do.

Biggest takeaways:

Write a script to pull the latest code from all repos daily—and let Claude Code write it. Al uses a 16-line script (written entirely by Claude Code) that pulls the latest main branch from all 15 repositories every morning. This ensures that he’s always querying current code instead of outdated information, solving the “docs are stale” problem that plagues most technical support teams.
Maintain a “customer quirks” page to make AI answers customer-specific. Al keeps a Confluence page listing each enterprise customer’s unique deployment requirements: how they handle secrets, namespaces, encryption, air-gapped environments. His Claude Code custom commands reference this page first, generating highly tailored deployment instructions instead of generic answers anyone could Google.
Combine code repositories with Confluence MCP for maximum context. Al’s custom Claude Code commands first check Confluence for deployment documentation, then query the code repositories if needed. This multi-source approach means Claude Code pulls from official docs, tribal knowledge, and actual implementation—delivering answers no single source could provide.
Your code is better documentation than your docs. Al realized public documentation couldn’t answer his enterprise customers’ detailed technical questions. By pulling all 15 of Galileo’s repositories into VS Code and querying them with Claude Code, he can now answer questions about how services cascade together, how features actually work, and deployment specifics that aren’t captured anywhere else.
Turn Slack support threads into knowledge base articles automatically. Using Pylon, Al converts detailed customer conversations into abstracted help articles with one click. These articles are more in-depth and current than official docs because they’re based on real customer questions and don’t require the overhead of PR reviews and approval processes.
Reduce engineering interruptions to near-zero by self-serving answers. Before this system, Al constantly pinged engineering with customer questions, creating frustration on both sides. Now he queries the code directly, only reaching out to validate answers or when Claude Code can’t find information (usually because it exists only in meeting notes or hallway conversations).
The human value-add is making AI answers sound human, and knowing when to validate. Al doesn’t blindly copy-paste Claude Code responses. He proofreads everything, removes telltale AI phrases like “in summary,” condenses verbose answers to what customers actually need, and validates complex technical answers with engineering when he doesn’t fully understand the implementation.
Compete on customer experience, not just product velocity. Everyone uses AI to ship faster products. Al uses AI to show up differently in customer relationships—delivering custom deployment documentation that accounts for each customer’s specific security requirements and infrastructure constraints. This differentiation in service quality is harder to replicate than product features.

Detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode:

How Al Chen Uses Claude Code and 15 Repos to Answer Any Customer Question: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/claude-code-and-repos-to-answer-any-customer-question
Automatically Create a Knowledge Base from Slack Support Threads: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/automatically-create-a-knowledge-base-from-slack-support-threads
How to Use AI to Answer Customer Questions from Your Entire Codebase: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-use-ai-to-answer-customer-questions-from-your-entire-codebase

If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything.

Catch you next week,
Lenny

P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.

I gave Claude Code our entire codebase. Our customers noticed. | Al Chen (Galileo)

2026-04-06 20:03:35

Al Chen is a field engineer at Galileo, an observability platform for AI applications, where he works on the front lines with enterprise customers asking highly technical questions. Despite never having held an engineering role, Al has built a system using Claude Code to query Galileo’s 15 separate repositories, combine that with Confluence documentation and customer-specific quirks, and deliver hyper-personalized answers that would otherwise require constant engineering support.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts