I've been on the supplier side of apparel sourcing (based in Hangzhou, working with winter clothing manufacturers), and I'm curious how brands on the buying side handle vetting before committing to a factory.

A few things I'd love to hear from this community:

- How do you evaluate fabric/material quality before seeing a physical sample?

I ve been experimenting with different ways to build outbound lists recently.

The usual tools show up quickly.

Clay. Apollo.
A bunch of automations promising endless leads.

And they are useful.

The Perplexity CTO announced at their developer conference this week that they're moving away from MCP internally. Garry Tan tweeted "MCP sucks honestly." Pieter Levels called it useless. The "MCP is dead, long live the CLI" post hit the top of Hacker News. OpenClaw, the hottest open-source agent project in the world, deliberately chose not to support it.

The argument: MCP tool definitions eat your context window. Auth is clunky. The whole thing is an unnecessary abstraction over APIs that already exist. LLMs are smart enough to call APIs directly, or use CLIs, or write their own integration code. Why add a protocol layer?

I m building a two-sided local services marketplace, and one of the questions I keep coming back to is how small the initial market should be.

At first, Houston felt like the obvious starting point. But the more we build, the more I think city-level thinking may be too broad for an early marketplace.

I have long struggled with trying to consume news on my phone. I think news is still too high volume, uncontextualised and not built for learning. Do you guys have any good examples or ideas of News Aggregration app that can be built for people who are not news enthusiasts but would like to know whats happening in the world?

There is a strange irony I have been sitting with lately.

I am building an app specifically to help young people feel less alone. And yet, some of the loneliest moments I have experienced have been in the past year, building it.