... just name it rather than pretend. I post here because it's where the people I want to talk to actually are, and I'd be writing this the same way if none of it were ever cited. Murror sits badly inside all of this, which is why I've been thinking about it. Nobody searches for an AI companion for understanding your emotions. They type something like "why do I keep having the same fight." The gap between ... ... uses is enormous, and that gap is where products in spaces like mine quietly disappear. I don't have this solved. I've just stopped assuming the name is the thing that gets found. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... that ends, a reflection that concludes reads as thoughtful. A hard cap that fires mid-use tells your most invested user she's used too much of the thing she's paying for. Same economics, completely different product. The Murror version of this is uncomfortable and I'd rather say it than imply I'm above it. Our heaviest users are people going through something. The person journaling every day is in a hard month, and she is simultaneously ... ... still the signal. It's just no longer free. Comment from Abrar Sami(@abrar_sami1): True, your north-star metric can no longer be engagement alone. It has to be engagement contribution margin. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... Board have assessed it as adequate, and adhering to it is the cheapest way to demonstrate compliance on the marking duties. Opting out means demonstrating compliance some other way and fielding more requests for information. The Murror version: we infer emotional state from what people write, and nothing else, so 50(3) isn't ours. 50(1) is, and I don't get to lean on "it's obvious" someone arriving from an ad in a bad week ...

... never sees your brand. Distribution without a front door. But I want to make the harder argument, because I live on the other side of it. Not every product should be a tool an agent picks up. I build Murror, an AI companion for understanding your own emotions, and "expose it as an MCP tool so agents can call it" is a genuinely bad idea for us, and it's worth being precise about why. The value of Murror

... your own evidence otherwise, and price your acquisition spend as though most of it evaporates. And stop reading engagement as a health metric without a second signal next to it. "Sessions down" is now a question, not an answer. Murror sits awkwardly inside all of this, which is why I've been chewing on it. We're a journaling and reflection product. Someone using us less could mean they've drifted off, or it could mean they're doing better ...

... word on anything that matters. A judge with a length bias will happily tell you your more verbose, worse version is the better one. I'll say the harder part, because I build on the wrong side of this. Murror is an AI companion for understanding your own emotions, and there is no benchmark for it. None. There's no golden answer to "did this help someone sit with a hard feeling for ten minutes." The trajectory framing doesn ... ... noise. They'll be the ones who built a small, honest, embarrassingly manual way to see what their thing actually does to real people and looked at it often enough to catch it drifting. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... harmed user can sue for at least $1,000 per violation plus attorney's fees. That last part is why this isn't theater. You don't need a regulator to notice you; a plaintiff will do. I build Murror, which is squarely a companion-adjacent product an AI for understanding your own emotions so I'm not writing this from the cheap seats. Here's the opinion I'll defend: treat this as a design spec, not a compliance ...

... behavior that lights up your retention chart. That's not a bug you'll catch in testing. It's a gradient your product will slide down if you optimize for what looks like success. I build Murror, an AI companion for understanding your own emotions, so I sit right on top of this trap. The single most tempting thing I could do and the single most destructive is make the thing validate whatever you bring it. It would feel amazing ...

... collapsed. That's the good news, and it's genuinely great. Here's the part nobody puts in the launch post: when the technical friction disappears, the emotional friction doesn't. It just becomes the whole job. I build Murror, an AI companion for understanding your own emotions, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the inside of a builder's head. And what I keep noticing, in myself and in the makers I talk to, is that ... ... anxiety, unnamed, turns into three impulsive pivots and a rewrite you'll regret. Most bad product decisions I've made were feelings I mistook for strategy. Naming it first is boring and it works. It's most of what Murror

... legible. A closed deal is legible. A qualified lead is legible. That's why support and sales tools went there first the outcome practically timestamps itself. Now try it on a product whose value is subjective. I build Murror, an AI companion for understanding your own emotions. What's the outcome I'd charge for? A journal entry written? People write when they're spiraling and skip when they're fine, so charging per entry would mean my incentives ... ... pricing page that was winning last quarter. They'll be the ones who priced the thing they actually do, especially when the thing they do can't be reduced to a number. Comment from Joseph Walker(@joseph_walker2): @monatruong_murror

... need obeyed should be the last thing the model reads, not buried in a system prompt from forty turns ago. I'll be honest about where this hit home for me. A while back we made a decision at Murror that looked, on the surface, like a product or privacy call: we made the AI forget most of what you'd told it every 30 days. We expected it to make the reflections worse, because less history should mean less ... ... feels like the actual skill isn't deciding what to leave out once, it's re-deciding it continuously, which is a much harder engineering problem than just writing a tighter system prompt. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... genuinely useful for scale, but if you never read raw outputs yourself, you slowly drift toward whatever the judge rewards, which is not the same as whatever your users need. I'll be upfront about my bias. At Murror we build emotional AI a product that helps people journal and understand their own patterns and evals are hardest exactly where the output is subjective. There's no unit test for "did this reflection feel true to the person who wrote ... ... whether what they shipped is good. Write the twenty cases. Do it today, before the next feature. It's the least glamorous hour you'll spend this week and probably the highest-leverage one. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... your product a moment where the system checks itself before it agrees, instead of reflexively reaching for the warm answer. I'll name my bias, because it's the whole reason this study landed on me so hard. At Murror we build emotional AI a product whose entire job is to reflect how someone actually feels back to them. A mirror that only ever flatters isn't a mirror, it's a wall with a nice voice. If our product ...

... talking about real experience in places like Reddit and niche forums. Not astroturf; that gets sniffed out and it poisons the well. Actual presence, actual answers, actual usefulness where your customers already gather. I'll name my bias. At Murror we build emotional AI, and I've watched the flip side of this up close: an AI describing something with total confidence and getting it subtly wrong. The scariest version of this shift isn't being left ... ... found anything that actually works for tracking this over time, even roughly? That feels like the missing half everyone can see the problem now, but almost nobody can see if they're fixing it. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... user to say "this looked right and wasn't" and you need someone actually reading those. That's the only sensor that sees the failure your dashboards are blind to. I'll be honest about the bias here. At Murror we build emotional AI a product whose whole job is to reflect someone's feelings back to them with real insight. In that context, confidently wrong isn't a bug report, it's a wound. A mirror that misreads ... ... best day, on a task you made up. Your users meet it on an average day, on the task they actually have. Build for the average day. That's the whole game now. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... only happens when you personally post, you've built a job, not a loop. That's a design problem, and you can solve it the same way you solve any other feature. I'll admit the bias here. At Murror we spend our days on a product about understanding one person deeply reflecting someone's emotions back with real insight instead of a generic mirror and the longer we do it, the more I think distribution is the same skill ... ... this: if building is no longer the moat, then the moat is available to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work. Knowing your person. Owning a relationship instead of renting attention. Being early to a workflow before a competitor

... inside your app if they can only feel understood while they're talking to your model you haven't solved loneliness. You've made it more comfortable to stay lonely. You've built a very sophisticated waiting room. The alternative is to design for the exit. Concretely, that means three things. Point users back at real people, not deeper into the app. The most valuable thing an emotional AI can do isn't be a better listener than your friends ... ... product working. The hard part is being honest enough to call that a success internally, because every dashboard you've ever seen is built to call it a loss. This is the bet we've made with Murror

... honestly, it would be the easiest feature we could build. The AI is already there. The conversation engine exists. We could ship it in a week. We won't. Here's what we've learned building Murror: the moment you give someone a chat interface for emotional reflection, you've changed the activity from "writing to understand yourself" to "talking to get a response." The posture shifts. Instead of sitting with a feeling, you're waiting for validation. We tested ... ... weeks. The journal entries got shorter. The reflections got shallower. People started asking the AI "what should I do?" instead of exploring what they actually felt. The AI became a crutch instead of a mirror. The whole point of Murror

... months ago we added a pause to Murror. After you finish a journal entry, the AI waits. No instant analysis. No immediate insight. Just a small animation and 8 seconds of silence. Our engineer thought it was a bug when he first saw the spec. "You want me to add... a delay?" Yes. On purpose. Here's why. We ran an experiment: instant AI response vs

... Something weird happened last week. I ve been working on another product alongside Murror a side project we re experimenting with, built almost entirely through AI. I m not a developer. I can t read most of the codebase. But I shipped a feature that three users have already told me feels exactly right. And I cannot explain to my team how it works. Not the user-facing part I designed that. I know what it should ... ... ticket. But the cost is this disorienting feeling of owning something you can t fully explain. I know what it does. I don t know how it does it. And I m learning to be okay with that. Building Murror

... When we first built Murror, we stored every journal entry forever. More data meant better emotional pattern detection, smarter insights, richer reflections. Our AI kept getting better. Our users kept getting quieter. We dug into the data. Users who'd been on the app for 3+ months were writing shorter entries. Less personal. More surface-level. "Had a good day." "Feeling okay." We ran user interviews. The pattern was clear: the longer people used Murror

... team: We added gentle cooldown prompts after the third entry in a short window. Not blocking access just a pause that says "you've been here a lot today. want to try something offline first?" - We stopped celebrating streaks. Murror has no streak counter, no daily login rewards. Coming back should feel like a choice, not an obligation. - We built a "quiet mode" that reduces AI reflections to simple acknowledgments when it detects repetitive emotional loops. The result ... ... always the same direction. Sometimes the right metric is one that goes down. Anyone else building products where you've had to choose between engagement and user wellbeing? Curious how others navigate this. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... When we first built Murror, our AI would automatically surface emotional patterns after every journal entry. "You've mentioned feeling anxious about work 4 times this week." "Your mood tends to dip on Sunday evenings." Users loved it in demos. They called it "impressive" and "insightful." Our internal metrics looked great -- pattern detection accuracy was 87%. But something was off. People were journaling less over time, not more. After two weeks, entries got shorter. After a month, many users stopped ... ... push information at users, engagement drops. Every time we let them pull it when they're ready, it goes up. Has anyone else found that making AI less visible actually made it more valuable? Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror

... first year, we marketed Murror as an "AI-powered emotional companion." It was technically accurate. It was also the worst positioning decision we made. Here's what happened: people who downloaded expecting an AI chatbot were confused. Murror

... three months, the #1 feature request in Murror was "let me share my journal entries with my partner." It made perfect sense. Murror