14.ai Dispatch #2
Please remain calm.
April 14, 1912.
Titanic strikes an iceberg at 11:40 PM ship time.
Captain Smith opens a support chat.
CAPTAIN: Urgent. Ship sinking. Immediate assistance needed.
TITANIC SUPPORT: Hi there! 👋 Thanks for reaching out. Our team typically replies within 24 hours. To expedite your request, please provide the 16-digit hull number located on the lower stern.
Before we dive in, what brings you here today?
Select one:
🚨 Ship sinking
🧳 Lost luggage
🍽 Dinner reservation
👀 Just browsing
CAPTAIN: Ship Sinking
TITANIC SUPPORT: Great choice! ✅ Connecting you with our Water Entry Experience Team™
Due to unusually high volume, we are currently assisting other ships 🛳️. Your patience is appreciated.
⏳ Estimated wait time: 2 hours 41 minutes
While you wait, check out these helpful articles:
🛠️ “How to patch a hull”
📡 “SOS vs CQD: Choosing the right distress signal”
🦺 “Beginner’s guide to staying buoyant”
Take a short survey after your session for a chance to win a dry towel!
Advanced Prompting Workshop
You asked. We prompt.
We’re hosting another workshop, this time about advanced prompting.
Based on our prompting guide and the firehose of questions from our first session.
June 18, 9 AM PT.
Bring your weirdest use cases. We’ll break them down, clean them up, and maybe make fun of them a little. Lovingly.
Sushi Engineering Meetup: San Francisco
You know what goes well with raw code?
Raw fish.
We’re hosting an engineering meetup in San Francisco.
Sushi will be served. So will mildly controversial takes about AI and infrastructure.
Welcome to the team, Corey!
Some students spend summer on beaches.
Corey Mostero joined us instead.
He’s an Applied Math major at UC Berkeley, Tech Lead at Cal Hacks, and the newest member of the 14.ai engineering team.
In case you missed it
Why 14.ai?
Michael wrote about the name, the mirror, and the secret meaning. Read more here.
AI Horseless Carriages
Are we building the future, or just strapping AI to old workflows and hoping for the best? Read it here.
Cool jobs at 14.ai (and friends)
Looking for a new gig? Here are some great roles from our orbit:
🛠️ Founding Engineer @ 14.ai (San Francisco)
🧑💻 Support Engineer @ Supabase (Remote, Americas)
💬 Head of Technical Support @ Nooks (San Francisco)
⚙️ Technical Support Engineering Manager @ Ashby (Remote)
Need an intro? Just ask.
What we’re reading & listening to this week
Corey - Dillon Mulroy, Throw Try/Catch in the 🗑️ Level up your React error handling with the Result type
Marie - Mike Knoop, Reflecting on Frontier AI Reasoning Systems
Maya - Julie Bort, Superblocks CEO: How to find a unicorn idea by studying AI system prompts
Michael - Geoffrey Litt, Malleable software
Pinkie - Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman
Ugo (aka Ugoat 🐐) - Basti Sans Ms, The huge problem with iOS 26...
That’s it for this week.
If you’re building something weird and useful, we’d love to hear about it.
If your ship is sinking, we’ll do better than 2 hours 41 minutes.
— Team @ 14.ai