/shuffle

I'm here to tell you about a hidden feature of sorts that I built for Buttondown. Go to buttondown.com/shuffle and you will be served a completely random archived email, pulled from the population of all newsletters who expose their archives and consent to being indexed by search engine brokers. This tool began as a bit of a joke internally. The phrase "StumbleUpon for newsletters" was at one point deployed. It has since become a bit of a tether for me, a splash of water that reminds me of what actual users are up to -- and, just as importantly, reminds me that all the test data and sniffing around for edge cases is nothing compared to the sheer breadth of the UGC firehose. 1(Is that two water metaphors in a single paragraph? Whatever.) Much hay has been made of the ability of LLMs to sniff out latent bugs lurking within your codebase. But even judging solely on wall clock time, Fable and Astra have absolutely nothing on the efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio of me spamming refresh…