AI amplifies judgment, doesn't replace it. 25 years building and growing tech business. Advisor, builder, pragmatic contrarian. Lisbon.
Portugal
Joined October 2007
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🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
This is one of the better litmus tests for whether you’re pushing your use of AI enough or not.
Up until maybe six months ago probably the best you could do with AI was pull off something you already would produce, but just doing it a little faster. But now we’re entering a point where the output of working with AI can and should dramatically exceed what you would been able to do before, in a fraction of the time.
The product prototype should not only be fully functional and interactive, but it should probably have meaningfully better features than it would have had before. The engineering architecture should be able to deliver performance gains that you wouldn’t have been able to go after otherwise.
The research for a project should consume every single fact on the subject across every dimension of analysis possible. The business process you implement with AI should operate entirely differently and learn from all its past failures in a way no human could.
We’re unquestionably entering a period where AI will be smarter than us on most axes. Perhaps not on every dimension that matters (intelligence is still very jagged), but at least on enough dimensions that when we combine it with what we’re good at, you get qualitatively different outcomes.
So the simple test is: if you could have done what you’re doing before AI, you’re likely not pushing it enough.
Love the spot on analogy
“Giving every employee AI — the best models, the most tokens — is not the same as becoming an AI-native company.
It’s like giving every employee a Steinway and expecting a symphony. What you actually get is a lot of expensive noise.
“
I’ve been building a record collection as if I were curating a painting exhibition.
It’s called The Electric Line — 1967–2007.
The idea is simple: a good exhibition isn’t a room containing the “best” paintings.
It has a point of view.
Someone decides where the story starts, what belongs, what doesn’t, what sits next to what — and what connections become visible.
I wanted to do the same with records.
The Electric Line is 40 albums tracing one particular path through popular music: how experimentation, technology and the studio changed what a band, a song and eventually an album could be.
Velvet Underground → Bowie / Eno → Kraftwerk → punk → post-punk → New Order → acid house → electronic music → Radiohead → LCD Soundsystem.
But it isn’t a canon.
Important records are missing. Deliberately.
The constraint is part of the curation.
For every record I ask:
Why does it belong?
What came before it?
What did it make possible afterwards?
What was happening somewhere else?
That has also changed how I collect vinyl.
Instead of simply asking “Do I like this?” or “Is this important?”, I ask:
What role does this record play in the story?
I’m gradually collecting the 40 records on vinyl.
And because a shelf can’t show all these relationships, I built a website for the collection.
You can follow the chronological line. Or jump between records through their connections.
Much like walking through an exhibition: there is a route suggested by the curator, but you’re free to construct your own.
So The Electric Line is becoming three things at once:
a collection,
a curation project,
and an exhibition about how ideas travel through music.
electricline.whsrecords.com/
Se há algo que me irrita na discussão sobre o desenvolvimento de Portugal é a conversa da produtividade. Porque é sempre uma constatação de facto: é baixa, não cresce, tem que crescer.
Mas o que raio é essa produtividade?
Não trabalhamos?
Fazemos ronha ou demasiadas pausas para café?!
Nunca ninguém explica.
Por isso fui ver. Fui pesquisar.
eosistema.pt/artigos/porque-…
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
Evidence getting harder to ignore, but always hard to convert cult members.
The below is PPP-adjusted, shows median and various income brackets, after in-kind transfers. Nowhere to hide.
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
Coimbra to orbit. Neuraspace raising €15.6M to manage space traffic with AI is a proper Portuguese win, and the kind we should be shouting about more. Congrats to the team.
Neuraspace, a Coimbra-based #space and #defence company providing AI-enabled Space Domain Awareness (#SDA) and Space Traffic Management (#STM) solutions, today announced €15.6 million in new financing. 🇵🇹 🛰️🛡️
eu-startups.com/2026/08/port…
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
Because we want our AI to thrive in a moment of exponential growth, we will impose some regulation so we are absolutely sure that only the best of the best can make it!!
Thank you for protecting us!
Most of the AI act’s rules come into force today.
The EU's #AI act is the world's first law on artificial intelligence. The act aims to ensure that AI systems are safe, ethical and trustworthy.
Read more → link.europa.eu/rJWXFh
ALT Infographic illustrating the EU AI act’s risk-based approach, showing four categories of AI uses (allowed, transparency required, regulated, banned) mapped to increasing levels of risk (minimal, limited, high, unacceptable).
A - build a travel company app while waiting for boarding
B - disconnect and open a book
😅
Family Vacations with city hopping, trains and road trips. Slightly planned. Great way to immerse yourself in the present and divert the monkey-mind.
Family wise is also a challenge. It is the time of the year we spend most time together, we decide together, we experience everything together.
Negotiation and tolerance are key for thriving and getting the most out of our time together.
Family Vacations with city hopping, trains and road trips. Slightly planned. Great way to immerse yourself in the present and divert the monkey-mind.
Family wise is also a challenge. It is the time of the year we spend most time together, we decide together, we experience everything together.
Negotiation and tolerance are key for thriving and getting the most out of our time together.
Interesting that, contrary to the initial beliefs, AI is evolving to become a system of models instead of a model to rule them all.
Somehow we thought that even if we’re mimicking human thinking/language and even if human intelligence is spread across different individuals with different skills, the AI model would be a model to rule them all in some kind of superintelligence or Avengers-in-one.
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
Theme SaaS - the startup simulator, starting from the old garage 😅
Play it here: themesaas.com/
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
These guys had a crisis in late 2024 when their revenue declined sharply. It seemed dire at the time, but now you practically need a magnifying glass to see it.
One of the aspects that makes the AI technological revolution different is how we’re seeing and experimenting with it live as it happens.
It’s exciting but also confusing, overwhelming, and subject to hype and manipulation.
There’s a need to tune signal from noise.
Maybe the internet revolution was similar, but we didn’t have social media, so it felt slower and more difficult to know what was happening at any given moment.
How does it feel for you?
You don't write one brief anymore. You write two.
One for the humans reading it. One for the AI tools that they will use to deliver the work. \_()_/
Same project. Completely different structure.
My engineering thesis was about AI. Then I spent 25 years ignoring it.
Well, not exactly.
P&G. Telecom. Built an agency across four countries. Nearly seven years at Unbabel scaling from $1M to $15M. PandaDoc on its way to $1B.
Now both worlds are colliding.
Building AI products (Jolt, CMO Copilot). Advising founders and leadership teams through Farol Growth Partners. Running Forge 1000 for people who learn by doing.
And writing about what I'm seeing -- which is a lot.
25 years taught me one thing: AI doesn't replace human judgment. It amplifies it.
The companies winning right now are the ones designing the right interface between human wisdom and machine capability.
That's what I'm focused on. Building it. Advising on it. Writing about it.
What are you seeing out there?
🟧Hugo H. Macedo 🟧 retweeted
Creating a world of abundance isn’t about creating a world of luxury, it’s about creating a world of possibility.
“Digital nomads?! I hate them! They don’t really work! I’m sure is their parents paying” 🙉
Crazy how people need to solve their cognitive dissonance of not believing it is possible to work from anywhere, to have freedom and to be professionally fulfilled. Or is it just envy?