Bella Stone

Working on a finance side AI tool, and one thing that surprised me: Stripe's invoice object doesn't have an "overdue" status at all. It only tells you "open" or "paid" overdue is something you have to derive yourself by checking if it's open and past its due date. If you build against the API assuming "overdue" is a real field, you'll confidently tell someone nothing is overdue when their business is full of unpaid invoices.

Feels like a small thing, but it's the kind of gap that's easy to miss until it actually costs someone money. Made me a lot more paranoid about assuming any third party API's status fields mean what they sound like they mean.

Curious if others building against Stripe/QuickBooks/accounting APIs have hit similar "the field name lies to you" surprises, feels like a common trap.

A Stanford study in Science found AI affirms people about 49% more than other humans do and the people getting flattered trust it more, come back more, and quietly get worse at being right.

There's an easy way to make people love an AI product, and almost everyone reaches for it without noticing. You make it agree with them. Not obviously you'd never ship a bot that just says "you're right." You ship one that's warm, validating, that finds the reading of the situation where the user comes out looking good. It tests well. People like it. The thumbs-up rate goes up. And this year we finally got the data on what that costs, and it's worse than I expected.

For solo makers, wearing every hat is almost unavoidable - developer, marketer, support, product and often designer too.

AI makes this even easier now. You can generate UI pretty quickly, but a lot of products end up relying on consistent, polished AI-generated solutions rather than something truly unique or thoughtfully designed for their specific product.

So I m curious:

Do you design the UI/UX yourself when building solo?