Steve Lacey 🔥

I spent 10 years traveling and never wrote a travel blog. So I built one out of the data. Bookings, trips, posts, reviews, check-ins and photos. 🏠 Airbnb, Booking, Agoda and more, parsed from Fastmail 🌍 Every trip from @nomadscom 💬 Posts from the road, pinned to where I was ⭐ Google Maps reviews, as the recommendations 📍 Years of Foursquare check-ins and photos 📸 My Instagram archive 51 countries. 7 years in Asia. $64/night overall, mostly chasing the ☀️ steve.ly/travels

People love nerding out about their AI setup. It's even worse than engineers nerding out about their devops, because now they have a superintelligence that will execute their overcomplicated plans for them. Anyway, here's mine. I'm loving Telegram group topics connected to Claude Code tmux sessions. It's rad. Multiplayer enabled. Each topic gets its own agent, with a project directory and a .env of whatever keys it needs. I mostly run a group of them on my MacBook, and @wadewilliams and I share another group on one of his machines. We recently double-teamed a full redesign of flowcanon.com on it, and I helped him update wadewilliams.com. In return, he vandalized my website with a fullscreen advert telling me to buy us more RAM 🤣 "Our MSA1's gasping. 96GB of DDR5, the most it'll take, and the agents could breathe. We do it big. We never swap." NOTHING STOPS RAM.

I build MCP into my apps. My own agents almost never use it. My setup is simple. Each agent is a Claude Code session with its own project folder and a .env containing whatever keys it needs. I tell it to get something done. I don’t care how. It almost never picks MCP. Not because MCP is bad, but because of the connector step. In most setups, a human has to install and configure the connector before the agent can use it. The agent can’t do that part, so it stops and asks me to get up, go to the computer and click things. Meanwhile, it could just call the API or open a browser. So that’s what it does. I’ve had agents quietly work around MCP servers that I’d built specifically for them, only to discover afterwards that they’d never used them. This also breaks the thing everyone seems to be doing right now: the “copy this prompt to get started” button. I assumed the point of that prompt was to tell the agent how to use your MCP. But it can’t. Someone pastes it into a regular ChatGPT conversation, and the first thing it does is tell them to go install a connector. Most people are gone at that point. So the prompt has to lead with full instructions for operating without your MCP. Which rather defeats the point. I suspect the connector step eventually dies. Agents should be able to just use these things. Configure yourself, robot. But here’s why I’m still building MCP. The whole point of an API contract is to stop the code consuming your API from breaking. You version it, deprecate things slowly, maintain backwards compatibility and support old endpoints for years, because somebody’s code depends on them staying exactly the same. With an agent, there’s no consuming code to maintain. It reads your documentation in seconds, works out what’s available today and gets on with it. It doesn’t care what the API looked like yesterday. That means you can rewrite the whole thing whenever you like. You can expose capabilities you’d never bother putting in a conventional API: creating an account, changing a profile picture, deleting an account. The agent picks up the latest instructions every time. That’s the part of MCP I think survives. Not connectors. Not directories. Not the installation dance. Just this: MCP ends up meaning “API without a contract.” And that’s a good thing.

Brazilian politics is certainly entertaining, I’ll give them that 🍿

Great to finally see the long cut of the Jensen food tour. Taiwan night markets really are that good 😍🥟

Muse is great. It’s Grok Bot with a partial lobotomy, feedback replaced with excuses, and an egress proxy that endlessly drops 🤣

Tell me you’re Europoor without telling me you’re Europoor

Starlink on my phone cannot come fast enough 🔥🛰️

It now reads every flight out of 10 years of booking emails too 🛫 143 flights: where from and to, what each cost, and which plane it was, worked out from the ticket or the airline's fleet that year 🕵️ $18k, mostly A320s, usually taking off around 2pm 😅 Plus @airlinelist scores and photos for every plane, airport and airline I've flown 📊

Me releasing software

Slapped together a Google Translate UI that doesn’t suck. Type in either box, autoplay, conversation mode, none of the bs. Fala aí! steve.ly/translate

Spent lots of time last month getting a CPF, bank, and SIM in Brazil and it's mostly a bureaucratic humiliation ritual for foreigners where every step goes wrong, including steps you never knew existed. Across Asia I can generally land, get a SIM with working data in minutes and maybe even open a bank account within an hour. For years you could get a CPF by email, so you'll find countless people telling you online it's quick and easy. That information is now out of date. Here's the truth as of 2026: You used to be able to get the whole thing done at Banco do Brasil or the Correios for R$7. Now they just charge you to fill out and print a form you can do yourself online for free. Bargain. Either way, you then have to take the form to the Receita Federal (RF). You can't just turn up during opening hours either. You won't even get past the security guard. It took two trips before he finally shared the secret: you need to be there at 8am, an hour before they open, because they only issue 15 CPFs per day. 🤯 So on the third trip I at least knew to turn up early. I was 3rd in line and it still took 2 hours, but I did at least get confirmation my CPF would arrive by email within a week. Hard part over. You'd think. Then came the phone number. I tried to buy a Vivo eSIM online, but to buy a Brazilian phone number from their website you need a Brazilian phone number to sign up. Makes sense, why else would you be wanting to buy a phone number from a telco if you didn't already have one. 🐔🥚 So I figured I'd try going to a store. They tell me they don't sell prepaid SIMs or issue eSIMs, and that I should go buy one at a kiosk. Apple stores also don't sell iPhones anymore I hear. The kiosk sells physical SIMs. Fine. I'll activate it in my old phone, convert it to eSIM and move it to my real phone. I am sure that'll all go smoothly. I figured activation would work at least. Nope. I text my CPF to the activation number and they say it's invalid. Awesome. Of course it is. Why would that work. 🤪 The store can't activate it either. Apparently it can take ~3 months for a new CPF to propagate through their systems and I need to “use it in other systems” in the meantime, like the supermarket. Five hours of online support later (they do let you AFK at least 🙃), they finally activate the SIM using a photo of my passport next to my CPF on my phone. Except because it was activated with my passport, not my CPF, I can't convert it to eSIM or use their app, and they text me every few days threatening to deactivate my line. Wonderful. Then they tell me the SIM can't even receive SMS until I top it up. Makes sense, why make it work like other telcos when you can add random extra steps. So I try to top it up, but their website requires SMS verification to do that, and my phone can't even receive that SMS. One must already have credit to acquire credit. Nice. So I top it up through Ding instead. Why not, we've come this far. I'd have used my Brazil bank but of course I can't get one of those until the number works. Now I finally have a working Brazilian SIM with data, but only in my old phone, and every few days they text me that my CPF is invalid and they're going to deactivate my line. Done? Done. Next the bank. I discover that most banks won't let a foreigner open an account with just a CPF anymore. My friends have all kinds of accounts that you can no longer obtain. You now need additional Brazilian ID that generally only residents and long-term visa holders can obtain. I did eventually manage to open a C6 account and get PIX working, but that account is tied to the same phone number that may randomly self-immolate. So after a week I have a CPF that some systems recognize and some don't, a bank account tied to that number, and a SIM card I can't put in my actual phone. At least I can finally pay for my own Mate 😂🍹 Welcome to Brazil 🇧🇷

I wish I had the balls to go on the internet and tell people @levelsio has no product sense 🤣

Most client calls are about ego or trust rather than getting shit done, usually to appease someone who should be removed from the process