This week I launched another new side-project, looked into the pros and cons of the memory feature in AI , and was reassured about the future of work.
As a reminder, each week I cover:
Reflections, insights, and learnings from the week's work and research;
Tools and resources relevant to entrepreneurship in the AI age;
Snippets and extra content related to The Complete Founder, particularly around entrepreneurial skills development.
The Week in Brief
⚽ Kicktrader is live. A free World Cup prediction game with a stock market twist. Built in a week with AI, nine iterations, and a near-miss with Italian football.
🤖 The future of work, according to Wharton. A Wharton professor's take on who wins and loses as AI takes over execution. Thought-provoking stuff.
🧠 I turned on AI memory. Then turned it off. What personalisation quietly does to the quality of your answers, and why I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.
Kicktrader: A Free World Cup Prediction Game
Most of this week went into building Kicktrader. It’s a free football prediction game with a stock market theme. (I wanted to call it Footsie 100, but got nervous about trademarks).
Players pick a portfolio of eight nations and earn points as they progress through the tournament. It's a more interesting alternative to the classic office sweepstake.
A few things I learned making it:
Nine iterations. I used Claude to develop the ruleset and points system, but human checking was essential throughout. Bugs ranged from including Italy in the tournament (they didn't qualify) to typos that broke the spreadsheet entirely. Claude is brilliant, but this would have been a disaster without rigorous human cross-checks.
Two AIs are better than one. I used ChatGPT as an external reviewer, giving me a second opinion on what Claude produced. I felt slightly guilty, then reminded myself that Claude doesn't have feelings and I'm paying for both.
The real value: the spreadsheet. Getting AI to build a complex, formula-heavy file that auto-updates for users was well beyond my own capability.
New tool: Squarespace. I used it for the first time to host the site. Less fiddly than WordPress, better visual options than Wix, and I didn't need Shopify's ecommerce features. It seems a good pick so far.
I can't give much time to promotion, so I'm going to share it with friends and my network and hope for some word-of-mouth. On the commercial side, I considered charging for the download, but until I've seen real-world use and I'm confident people are happy with it, that felt risky.
If you fancy a go, I'd love to know how you get on. And please do share it with anyone who'd enjoy it.
What Will Work Look Like?
One of the reasons I wanted to step out of my day job and take a sabbatical was to understand what the future of work might look like. I felt passive and vulnerable just carrying on, as AI nibbled at my professional utility each day. In some areas - coaching and signposting for example - I felt particularly threatened.
Clearly it’s a developing picture, but I found this article from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick interesting this week. He sees a positive future for ‘managers’ - those who delegate, evaluate, refine and organise others (the ‘others’ now being AI agents, not people) - and is pessimistic for ‘executors’, people delivering the tasks.
A few takeaways:
Human workers are transforming into managers of AI systems rather than executioners of individual tasks.
AI gives us infinite execution capacity. We are conditioned to conserve human effort because it has historically been scarce. We should now unlearn this.
Winners in this new era will treat agentic AI like an automated assembly line. Managers will use AI to double-check and critique its own work through adversarial prompting before another human handles the final, high-judgment review.
There’s lot’s more to read in the piece, including a case study of hackathon students who created various startups in days with AI.
To Turn on Memory or Not?
Do you use ChatGPT’s memory feature? I turned it on this week, to save repeating myself in prompts. I’m not sure I like how it changes things.
One early prompt ended with an unsolicited ‘Why This Matters For Someone Like You’ section which referenced my personal projects and gave me motivational advice.
It led me to look into the risks of using memory features like this. They include:
Response quality. Personalisation narrows your results, so you may never see the most useful examples because they didn't fit the AI's picture of you.
Shallow, sticky profiles. The AI builds a model of you from throwaway comments and early impressions that can colour every answer going forward.
Losing the clean slate. Once memory is on, you never quite get a fresh, assumption-free response again without actively managing what the AI knows.
Confirmation bias. If the AI knows your opinions, it's more likely to quietly validate them than challenge them, making it a worse thinking partner.
Authority erosion. A heavily personalised response becomes advice-for-you rather than information-about-the-world, making it harder to trust, share, or act on confidently.
Privacy creep. Of course the things you mention casually in conversation — client details, business struggles, personal situations — may be stored and resurface in ways you never intended.
The longer we have lived with the internet, the more unsure I have become about personalisation, whether it’s this, algorithmic silos on social media, or tailored search engine results.
The Plan This Week
I got pulled off my planning and metrics work by the sudden Kicktrader deadline, so this week I need to actually do it. The Founderval mini-course back-end changes are finished; the homepage refresh is all that's left before I go to market.
On the learning side, I'm using Iconic Cities as a live experiment with Meta ads and will need to find a decent tutorial to update myself on best practice.
I'll report back to stay accountable.
Have a good week!
Luke
🎩Hat-Tip I recently discovered James Sinclair’s business podcast (UK). James won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I found his no-nonsense dives into guest’s business models and his frank advice a refreshing change for the ear
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