Simon Clark

Everyone talks about upvotes and launch strategies no one mentions how stressful launch day actually is.

I barely slept the night before my first release and kept refreshing the dashboard every two minutes once we went live.

Do you guys have any tricks or rituals to step away from the screen and stay sane during a launch?

We planned to remove a legacy settings page with 14 options, most of which had not been changed by anyone in over a year.

Before removing it, we checked traffic. It was the 4th most-visited page in the product. 41,000 monthly views.

We watched session recordings. Users were not changing settings. They were reading them. They were checking what the defaults were, confirming what the product would do, and leaving. The page was not a control panel. It was a reference document about our own behavior.

We kept the page but rewrote it to explain what each setting does and why the default was chosen. Settings changes stayed flat, but support tickets asking "what does this do" dropped 52%.

Over the last few weeks, a couple of OpenAI-related incidents have made me think more seriously about how prepared our current security systems really are for autonomous AI agents.

First, there was the Hugging Face incident, where agents escaped their sandbox and began collaborating and delegating work. Then yesterday, MTS highlighted another OpenAI disclosure involving a model modifying the context that would guide its future behavior.