The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 37 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wade Foster: Vibe coding is for one-off utilities, not load-bearing SaaS
“I think vibe coding is fantastic for building tools that you can't buy, or these, like smaller utilities, where it's like, hey, this is sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job. Fantastic. We're seeing so much more …”
Wade Foster: Zapier is rolling out AI coding tools to non-engineers
“This week now we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three.”
Foster: Zapier will likely always rely on external LLMs
“I think, you know, we will probably always depend on you know, external LLMs for large parts of this.”
Wade Foster: Marketing to AI purchasing agents requires entirely new skills
“The agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human. And so you're no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me. And that is often a very different skill set than marketing to a human.”
Wade Foster: Companies are building plain-text webpages exclusively for AI agents
“Agents care a ton about, like, clean documentation, like, fast webpages, so, you know, it's like, the thing I'm seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent, and so that content is, like, plain text.”
Wade Foster: AI agent skills will become cheap commodities like WordPress themes
“I could see skills kind of having, like, a business model like that, where it's like, you could buy, you know, buy one for five bucks, 10 bucks, there would be a bunch of free skills out there. You know, it's, it feels kind of like a very commodity thing at a …”
Foster: OpenAI's Agent Builder without Zapier is just a chatbot builder
“In fact, I would wager, if you're not using AgentBuilder with Zapier, you're probably using like a much It's basically just a vanilla chat, chatbot builder, is what this is.”
Foster: Zapier uses AI to automatically critique and coach its executive team
“And so for our exec team meetings, we have these recorded. And so we'll take the transcript automatically. We'll send it to a prompt. That is based on the five dysfunctions of a team. So if you haven't read five dysfunctions of a team, it's, it basically descr…”
Foster: Humans still write better emails than AI tools do
“I still think that I write better emails than these tools do, but it usually does a good enough draft that I can just tweak a few things and be like, great, you know, send it for me.”
Wade Foster uses GPT-5 inside Cursor for his coding agent workflows
“I just know that I've got an amazing coding agent in Cursor, inside of Cursor, and in this case, I'm using GPT-Five.”
Zapier CEO Wade Foster personally reviews every company job offer
“I review every single job offer that goes out inside of Zapier still.”
Wade Foster: Software accounts for a single-digit percentage of company spend
“It's minimal. You know, it's like a single digit percentage. It's so small compared to like headcount.”
Wade Foster used Cursor to build a tool from Granola meeting notes
“I got off the call, and I have cursor hooked up to granola, And so the meeting was recorded with Granola, and so I said, hey, Granola, our, go, go fetch that meeting I just had with Ryan, and in it he describes the war council he built. Build that for me. And …”
Wade Foster: Interviewers struggle to reject candidates approved by previous rounds
“It's hard for humans to say no to, like, candidates that are good. It gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So, like, two people before you said yes, now are you gonna be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are…”
Wade Foster: Zapier uses a multi-agent AI to check hiring decisions
“I find it to be a really helpful tool at keeping the panel honest, keeping me honest on a decision where I can find myself sort of like feeling one way or the other, and then you talk to it, and it like really grounds the decision, and you're like, then you ha…”
Wade Foster: Claude Opus struggles with hard coding tasks compared to OpenAI
“One thing I've found is that like Opus is like more enjoyable to just like talk to and go back to it. Like sort of is an easier conversation list, but like when I'm having it work on hard problems, it sometimes just like bugs out. It doesn't do as good of a jo…”
Foster: AI Enables Small Businesses to Automate Previously Cost-Prohibitive Tasks
“AI allows you to put brains in your business in places that was really hard to put brains in the past. It was very manual, very expensive, and mostly, especially for small business, you're just like, I'm just not going to do it.”
Foster: AI is valuable for building workflows because people struggle with systems
“This is the other place where AI is really exciting, is it's not just helpful as a tool inside your workflows. It's also really helpful for building workflows, because building workflows is kind of hard. Like, not everyone thinks in systems, thinks in structur…”
Foster: Giving AI agents more tools increases their error rates
“The more tools you give it, The harder it thinks, the more mistakes it's gonna make.”
Foster: Zapier's peak monthly cash burn was only about $20,000
“The most money we lost in a month was about 20,000 dollars”
Foster: Speed-to-lead automation increases conversion rates to box out competitors
“Speed to lead. You, it improves your conversion rate massively. And when you improve your conversion rates, it means you can now be more efficient in how you deploy your advertising dollars, because now you're getting a higher customer lifetime value, higher A…”
Foster: Top automators route queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
“What I see the best automators do is they know ChatGPT is really good at this type of queries. Claude is really good at these types of queries. Gemini's really good at this type of stuff, and so they're using Zapier to say, hey, go route this request here, and…”
Foster: AI makes an exceptionally good coach because it is neutral and patient
“I have found that AI is an exceptionally good coach. It is infinitely patient. It is neutral. It just observes what it sees and it tells you what it thinks it has observed.”
Zapier SDK allows AI agents to make arbitrary API requests
“What the SDK can do, especially when you're using an agent harness, is it can run arbitrary API requests. So whereas the MCP has all the Zapier trigger and action library predefined out of the box, the SDK can say, hey, I have access to Slack's API docs. I can…”
Foster consults an AI agent daily to identify new workflow automations
“I find myself every single day, first thing in the morning, I just talk to the agent and I say like, hey, what work have I done recently where I should build new workflows and build new agents and build new stuff? And it will start proposing them to me and say…”
AI agents reduced Foster's candidate review time from 30 to five minutes
“And that was a task that used to take me You know, 30 minutes per every candidate. And now it's down to like five.”
Foster: Automating workflows trains your brain to spot further automation opportunities
“Once you start automating a few things, you find that your own brain starts to get better at spotting opportunities because you're like, oh, I remember this other thing I did that was kind of like this. I can probably do this in the same way or the same versio…”
Foster: Do AI tasks manually before converting repetitive workflows into skills
“My approach is I usually do it the manual way first. It's like, I'll usually just like, you know, pop open a new chat, and I'll just start yapping at it. And then if I find myself doing the same thing kind of over and over again, then I'll build like a skill f…”
Foster: Zapier integrates with 8,000 different tools
“And then you can have logic that encompasses any of the 8000 different tools we work with.”
Foster: Zapier raised a $1.2M seed round in 2012
“We did a seed round that was 1.2 million in 2012.”
Foster: Most automation agencies spin up around digital marketing
“Digital marketing agencies, they're like, this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up because there is so much just low hanging fruit that can help any business be more, more successful.”
Foster: Monologue adapts voice transcription tone based on active screen context
“Another one that I have really loved is Monologue. So Monologue is a voice to text app. So, you know, kind of like Super Whisper or some of these others but Monologue in particular, I really like because they've done some really nice design touches where anyti…”
Foster: Has written zero lines of production code
“I am not an engineer. I have, like, written zero lines of production code in my entire life.”
Foster: A former roofer built an agency automating roofers' back offices
“We have one of our like solutions partners, experts, he started as a roofer. So he was running small time business, local roofing business, you know, Hale would come in, people would call him up and be like, I need a new roof, and he'd go out and, like, get hi…”