Iza
Saturday in Lisbon. I'm hunting for the FT Weekend.
I know how that sounds, but it's become a small ritual.
My house is being renovated so I'm living out of Airbnbs at the moment, which means I can't subscribe, which means every weekend I go on a sort of treasure hunt across the city.
A few bookshops keep it under the counter (like contraband), and a couple of press kiosks stock it but sell out before noon.
Saturday: nothing.
Sunday morning: nothing.
Sunday afternoon, 24 hours in, I find a shop that still has one tucked away.
I buy it, walk straight to Brasileira – this beautiful old café here in Lisbon that's been open since the 1800s – order a double espresso, sit down, and open the paper.
It's last week's edition. The one I'd already read!
I can't tell you how disappointed I was.
But what struck me more was how quickly something I'd been chasing for 24 hours became outdated, almost worthless. Same paper. Same articles. Just seven days late, and somehow flat – less relevant, less alive.
This is exactly what happens with AI now, every few weeks.
You build something on one tool.
A new model drops.
Suddenly what you built feels last-week – your ChatGPT workflow gets migrated to Claude, your manual automation gets replaced by Claude Code, the prompt library you spent a weekend on becomes outdated by an upgrade nobody warned you about.
The instinct is to feel behind.
To wonder what was the point of building any of it.
But here's the thing.
Reading the FT every weekend isn't really about the specific stories – the stories expire. What doesn't expire is the contextual map you build over time, the way a finance person notices things a layperson doesn't.
AI is the same. The specific tool you built on this year might get retired. Fine. But you stayed in it, you played with it, you migrated. And what compounds isn't the workflow – it's the operator instinct you developed by building.
That instinct is the only thing that doesn't expire.
And I realised, sitting there, that's actually what we do here, Iza.
It's not linear.
It's not how learning used to be.
The internet didn't shift this fast. Even the smartphone didn't.
So the only real question is whether you're staying in it.
Are you up to date?
Hit reply. I'm reading every response.
Best,
Darius