Welcome, humans.

Anyone else notice that ChatGPT and Claude always add a little arrow (like this "→") at the end of all the CTAs they write now? It's become a tell-tale sign of AI-generated ad copy for me lately; like the em-dash, but for ads.

I don't really know why it does it? Does anyone have data on adding an arrow to the end of a CTA link actually leading to more clicks? What do y'all think? Do you click links with arrows at the end of them more, or nah? Anyone tested this at all?

Arrows on CTA buttons, yay or nay?

In your experience, does adding an "→" to the end of a CTA actually lead to more clicks?

Yes, the arrow increases clicks.

No, the arrow doesn't increase clicks.

I've seen no measurable impact either way.

IDK but buttons are way better for CTR than plain links.

The reason I ask this is because if AI is just adding random arrows to the end of CTA links, and people just randomly accept them, and they don't actually matter, it's going to become a negative signal for ad copy that uses them if (really, when) "arrows = AI slop" becomes a thing. Ye been warned!

Here's what happened in AI today:

Pickle launched $799 AR glasses in controversial launch video.
China drafted stronger chatbot rules for minors and self-harm content.
AI cut news publisher traffic 50% since mid-2024.
60% of consumers now start tasks with AI instead of search engines.

Advertise in The Neuron here!

Would you buy a "Soul Computer" called Pickle?

A Y Combinator startup just launched a new pair of AI-powered AR glasses they're calling the world's first "soul computer." The name? Pickle 1.

Yup. A company named after a preserved vegetable wants you to strap always-on cameras to your face to capture your "soul."

"i'm not putting your pickle on my face" ←actual reaction to the launch video

Here's the deets:

The Pickle 1 went live for pre-orders on New Year's Day with a $799 price tag ($200 deposit, Q2 2026 delivery).
Founder Daniel Park, a medical school dropout turned e-commerce entrepreneur, pitched the Pickle as AR glasses that "remember your life with you" through something called Pickle OS.
Your Pickle OS organizes your experiences into searchable "memory bubbles", like say the first time you heard your glasses were called Pickle 1 and thought yup I'll buy that!

The specs sound impressive though:

68-gram aluminum frame.
Full-color AR display (claims widest field-of-view for standalone glasses).
12-hour battery.
Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.

Plus spatial audio, always-on cameras, and microphones that capture "ambient context" to anticipate your needs, such as:

Booking rides…
Making reservations…
Suggesting music based on scenery…
Even generating a photorealistic avatar for Zoom calls (y'know, so no one sees you wearing your Pickle 1s…).

Obviously there was some strategy involved here. The announcement racked up 4.5M views in the first day. And even though the name is goofy, they got ppl like us talking about it, so I guess… epic winning?*

But then things got weird. X user Zach Meyer noticed the demo video featured a Korean restaurant that doesn't exist, with price ranges and review counts that didn't match between Slack and the Pickle UI. And AR/VR veteran Cix Liv called it outright:

"The Pickle glasses are not real. It's literally just a mold of glasses made in China. The technology for AR glasses in this form factor isn't possible yet. Not even Meta or Apple has glasses like this."

And the GitHub repo for their "open-source" project? Just a README and an architecture PNG. No actual code. Sus? Yeah. Shady? Nah; probably just a marketing launch to build pre-order hype. But, y'know… maybe this one launched a bit too early??

Why this matters: We've seen this movie. New AI products are rough right now. Humane flopped, Rabbit underdelivered, Google Glass sparked the "glasshole" backlash for both looking nerdy and being a privacy nightmare.

Now Pickle arrives with bigger promises, a $4.35M budget, and six months until shipping; competing against Meta, Apple, and Snap with their billions in R&D. Even AI superfan Robert Scoble admitted: "If I'm wearing these in 18 months it would be a major miracle."

Our take: The tech (once real) would genuinely be useful. AI that remembers your keys, recalls names, and surfaces info before you ask = v clutch. But you can't launch revolutionary hardware on polished renders of nonexistent Korean restaurants. Either Pickle ships functional glasses in Q2 2026, or this becomes a cautionary tale about naming your "soul computer" after the funniest vegetable.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) just dropped a 13-tip masterclass on how he actually uses Claude Code in production. The setup might surprise you… it's, by Boris' own account, …pretty vanilla?

Here's what stood out to us:

Run Claudes in parallel. Boris runs 5 Claudes in his terminal + 5-10 more on claude.ai/code simultaneously, teleporting sessions between them as needed (wild).
Use Opus 4.5 with thinking for everything. It's bigger and slower, but you steer it less, making it faster overall.
- Hot take: use thinking for everything, everywhere; it's just better.
Start in Plan mode. Go back and forth until the plan is solid, then switch to auto-accept edits. Claude usually 1-shots it from there.
Automate with slash commands. His team uses commands like /commit-push-pr dozens of times daily to avoid repeated prompting. Commands live in git.
Share a CLAUDE.md across the team. Whenever Claude does something wrong, add it to the file so it doesn't happen again. They even @.claude on PRs via Github action to update it.

Our favorite insight: Give Claude a way to verify its work (call it the Carina Hong method). Boris says this 2-3x's quality. His Claude tests every change using the Chrome extension, opening browsers and iterating until the UX feels good. Whether it's running tests, bash commands, or simulator checks… verification in AI is everything.

Treats to Try

*Asterisk = from our partners (only the first one!). Advertise to 600K readers here!

*Wispr Flow turns your speech into clean, final-draft writing across email, Slack, and docs. It matches your tone, handles punctuation and lists, and adapts to how you work on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. When writing stops being a bottleneck, work flows. Start flowing for free today.
Scouts deploys AI agents that continuously monitor the web 24/7 for recurring tasks like house hunting, job searches, or tracking niche news—50% off all paid plans for launch.
Windsurf shipped Wave 13 with parallel multi-agent workflows, Git worktrees, and a dedicated terminal, and made its SWE‑1.5 coding model free for everyone for the next 3 months.
Seedream 4.5 creates cinematic images from text with accurate spatial layout and world knowledge, up to 4K resolution—$0.04 per image on Replicate.
Recursive Language Models let agents manage massive context by storing inputs in Python and delegating work to sub-agents instead of loading everything into the main model's context—early tests show gains on long-context task (environments).
If you're looking for new content to create or train on with AI (not like that ever stopped anyone before…), these works just entered the public domain; Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage, Einstein's writings, Charlie Parker's music, and more.

Around the Horn

Okay, this is just catnip for us… (source, another one)

China's draft rules would add stronger safeguards for minors using chatbots and tighter handling of self‑harm/suicide‑risk content.
NVIDIA was reportedly in advanced talks to buy AI21 for $2–$3B in what looked like a talent-driven deal.
The US War Department said it struck a deal to embed xAI's Grok models into GenAI.mil at IL5 so ~3M personnel can use it on Controlled Unclassified Information (with an early‑2026 rollout).
1. Related: Russia confirmed a national AI taskforce aimed at "technological sovereignty," including AI-enabled autonomous drones.
AI reduced traffic to news publishers by roughly 50% since mid-2024, though newsroom hiring has remained unaffected so far, according to a new study.
60% of consumers now start their daily tasks with AI rather than traditional search engines, marking a major shift in how people approach everyday activities.

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