Vercel's agent stack—and six more things worth opening.

AI, building, writing + jobs. Weekly-ish.

Hey —

No big intro — just a few interesting things from recent weeks.

Some are launches I kept thinking about, some are things I’m building or writing, and a few are job openings that looked worth saving. These are the ones that stuck.

Vercel Ship, in three layers

The part that caught me wasn’t any one announcement. It was how neatly the pieces now line up across the whole agent lifecycle.

The easiest way I found to make sense of the release is in three layers:

My read: put together, this feels less like a feature roundup and more like Vercel making a bid to become the default runtime for agent-built software—where agents build, execute, authenticate, deploy, observe, and even repair software. That’s the part I think is worth watching.

Martian's 50%-cost claim

Then came Martian’s Ship launch with one of the sharper claims I saw: Opus- and GPT-5.6-Sol-like behavior at exactly half the price.

What makes this more interesting than the usual “cheaper model” announcement is what they say they’re preserving:

My take: I wouldn’t swap anything blindly on this claim alone. But it is exactly the kind of thing worth running through your own evals—same prompts, same tools, same failure cases. Their benchmarks tell you where to start, not whether it works for your workload.

The AI email client I'm building

Meanwhile, most of my own build time has been going into Better Mail—an open-source, Gmail-native email client for summarizing threads, searching in plain English, and drafting replies while you still decide what gets sent.

Where it is right now: I’m in the less glamorous, but important, part—mailbox actions, drafts, review-before-send, sync behavior, and privacy details. It is still in progress, but it is starting to feel more like a real product than a landing page.

Seven opportunities worth opening

Since I’m actively job hunting too, I keep running into roles that look genuinely worth opening. I’m starting to collect a small batch here in every issue—using direct job links where possible, and the original X hiring post when that is the only source.

I saved these recently, but openings move fast. If one has already closed—or you find a better original link—reply and I’ll fix it for the next commit.

Two rabbit holes from recent weeks

I also published two pieces that started as questions I kept coming back to: