The Boring AI Setup That Beats Every ‘Power User’

If there were a leaderboard for the most productive AI users, I bet Boris Cherny would be at the top.

He created Claude Code as a side-hustle (now it generates $2.5B a year), and he has not written code by hand since November 2025.

He ships at an insane rate, and he does all this with a simple setup.

No special prompts, no complex procedures. Just discipline and structured work.

I dug into his approach looking for what creators can actually use. Three things stood out.

1. One model, the best one

Boris uses the most capable AI model available for every task. Always.

Not the cheapest. Not a mix of cheap for easy work and expensive for hard work. Just one.

He calls it "the correction tax": when a cheaper model gets it wrong, the time you spend fixing the output is greater than the money you saved.

The same applies to any AI tool. If you're using the free tier to save $20/month, but spending an extra hour editing every draft, you're paying more than you think.

2. Always plan before executing

Boris never lets the AI start working before they've agreed on a specific approach.

He describes a loop:

1. Outline the plan

2. Review it

3. Adjust it

4. Then let the AI execute

This alone takes his success rate on complex tasks from 30% to 80%.

This means: don’t open ChatGPT and type “write me a LinkedIn post about [TOPIC].”

Start with what you want to say, the angle, the structure. Instead of multiple rewrites, spend extra time defining what you want it to write.

3) When Building Is Free, Taste Is the Only Moat

Most of what Boris and his team builds never see the light of day. Across the board, they kill about 80% of what they create.

When production is nearly free, quantity becomes trivial. The only thing that separates you from everyone else is your ability to judge which 20% is worth publishing.

The question is not “Can I build it?” but “Should I ship it?”

I can draft 10 threads in no time. But if I publish all 10, I'm flooding my audience with filler. Generate 10, publish 2, let the other 8 die.

Your editing taste, your ability to look at a draft and know it's not there yet, is now your most valuable skill. AI can't replace it, because AI doesn't know what "good enough for your audience" means.

Only you do.

Stop Configuring, Start Opinionating: The New SaaS Playbook

AI coding tools are making it cheaper to build custom software than to pay for configurable SaaS platforms. The response isn't to add more features. It's to build products that enforce best practices instead of letting users configure their way to mediocre workflows. Companies that combine hands-on services with software have a unique edge here: they know what actually works in the field before they encode it into a product. The competitive moat is no longer the software itself, but the expertise baked into it.

→ Find out more

AI Won't Fragment Markets. It Will Consolidate Them.

The popular prediction is that AI will enable millions of small competitors to flood every market. The historical data points in the opposite direction: the top 1% of companies already capture roughly 80% of economic value, and AI is likely to widen that gap. Larger companies benefit more from AI because they have bigger datasets and can use automation to reduce the coordination costs that normally slow down large organizations. Expect the average large company's 350+ SaaS tools to shrink dramatically as platforms expand horizontally. Highly fragmented industries like consulting and accounting are next in line for rapid consolidation.

→ Find out more

Why "AI Can't Replace Experts" Is a Dangerous Bet

Most knowledge work runs on four layers: knowledge, understanding, intelligence, and creativity. AI now matches humans on all four, yet only about 4% of jobs require genuine creativity. The real vulnerability is organizational: most companies operate without documented processes, clear metrics, or visibility into how work actually gets done. Once expertise is captured and documented, AI can access it instantly and permanently, while humans forget, disengage, and lose context. The upside is that humans still hold two cards AI doesn't: subjective experience and personal desire. The future likely involves humans as creative decision-makers with AI handling execution.

→ Find out more

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury