Designed by hand, assembled by machine.

About

Terms Undisclosed: Bay Blend is a short weekday briefing on what is actually going on in Bay Area business and tech. It covers who is up, who is down, what people are whispering and what the press is getting wrong. It is written to be read in five minutes and repeated at dinner, where it will be credited to you.

The tone is dry on purpose. The takes are meant to be correct, and the jokes are there to help them along. Stories are chosen for water-cooler interest, and the number of press releases a story generated counts against it.

How this is made. Every weekday morning, software searches the news, picks the stories, writes the takes, attaches the links and sends the email, all before most readers have located their coffee. The daily run is fully automated, so in the technical sense there are no humans in the loop. The software in question is Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, which this briefing occasionally covers, so read those items with whatever discount you think fair.

There is, however, a human on the loop, which is a different thing and a much less restful job. The curator conceived the whole enterprise and designed every part of it, from the sections and the voice to the rules on what counts as a story, how dry the jokes should be, and when an old story earns an update. The curator reads each edition every morning, in the manner of a nervous parent at a school play.

The software is told to link only to pages it actually read, and it still gets things wrong now and then. That is what the footer means by occasionally wrong, and it is why every item carries its sources. Think of them as receipts.

Readers are welcome to forward the email and to quote short excerpts with a link back to the original. Please do not republish whole editions without permission. The software has no feelings about this, but the publisher does.

Designed by hand, assembled by machine. Questions, corrections and tips are welcome at human@termsundisclosed.com, where an actual human will read them.