Max Musing

The rule is simple: if your product can do something, code should be able to do it too. Chat, reports, settings, whatever. One feature, two surfaces.

This has always been good practice, but agents just changed the math on it completely.

I've watched this happen at least a dozen times now with teams we talk to: customers start asking for analytics, the team says "how hard can charts be," and 2 quarters later they've shipped a worse version of a BI tool and their actual roadmap is on fire.

The problem is that customer-facing analytics looks like one feature but it's actually 5 products stacked on top of each other:

• A query layer against production data

• Charting that doesn't look terrible

• Permissions and multi-tenant isolation (get this wrong once and you're writing a security disclosure)

• Performance that holds up when a customer asks for 2 years of data

• And now, because every customer expects it, an AI analyst that actually gets answers right