About this release candidate

This is release candidate 2 of Generation ZX Developers (GenAI Startup Edition), the second edition of Generation Z Developers (2018). It was not written the way the first edition was, and it is not the same book that release candidate 1 was, a few hours earlier.

In 2018 Dinis wrote the chapters himself, in a public repository, and readers sent fixes as GitHub issues. In 2026 the book is talked into existence: voice memos, written up with a journalist agent as articles in his voice, each ending with a brief for the roles that finish a book. A librarian reads every article, every decision and every one of the 2018 chapters and outlines, and writes one idea per thing the book would say: a sentence the book stands behind, with where it came from, down to the section of the article, and the 2018 file it answers. The ideas are placed on a chapter map, and each chapter is written from the ideas placed in it, by an agent that reads the articles and the 2018 text behind them and nothing else. The rule is simple: every number, every quotation and every story has to be in a source the chapter names. Where the sources run out, the chapter says so, in a note addressed to Dinis.

Release candidate 1 was the first end-to-end draft under that method: thirty chapters, written in a day. Dinis read it and arrived at the founder. The reader he wants to give this book to is the person who wants to start a GenAI company, and that reader is two generations: Generation Z, entering the workforce and becoming the entrepreneurs, and Generation X, the subject-matter experts he sees starting companies, often their parents. Together, Gen ZX, which goes back to his origins, the ZX Spectrum. The book got a title, an objective (by the end of it you have started a company), a new part at its centre, Start the company, a part rebuilt around shipping without a server, four more hands-on chapters, and a measure: the companies created from it. The articles the newsroom already had on pricing, selling, funding, zero-knowledge vaults, constraints and control came into the register as the first round's batch, and this candidate was rewritten under that frame: forty-one chapters in ten parts.

Some chapters are honest placeholders. The newsroom has no article yet on creating a limited company in the UK, on Lithuania, on Portugal, on the European Union's programmes, on the first customers, or on how a reader tells us about their company. Those chapters stand as their titles, their ideas and what is missing, until Dinis records the memos; the notes to him say which.

This is a candidate, not a version. The first edition is still the only official one. The candidate's working copy lives in the book's vault; this text is a frozen snapshot of it, so that what Dinis reads and marks up cannot change behind him, and his feedback produces the next candidate rather than an edit of this one. From here on, every word, change and idea that wants to come in goes before a review board, an advocate and a cutter and the readers and a checker and the editor, and Dinis decides; every verdict is kept with its reason and becomes a precedent. The diff between this candidate and the last is on the website, block by block, because Dinis reads the diffs.

The voice is Dinis's throughout, in the first person, because the material is his. Where a chapter sounds like him, that is the material doing its work. Where it does not, that is the agents', and it is what the review is for. The verbs he answers with are the ones the process gives him: keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it.

Read it as a reader first. Then, if you are Dinis, read it with a pen. And if you started a company because of something in it, tell us: that is the first entry in the measure.