One interesting thing I came across this week was that the CEO of Duolingo first declared intentions to use AI to replace contract workers in some positions. However, they later withdrew that comment, making it clear that AI will not replace its employees.
Ahh, this type of discrepancy appears to be happening more often, to be honest. The same thing happened to Klarna not long ago. That AI will take care of everything in one minute, and then, hold on: in reality, we still need human workers.
When we first launched, we operated lean. We improvised our tools, worked out of tiny spaces, and every dollar spent was strictly tracked. Then right after our first funding round, we upgraded to expensive software suites, hired too quickly, and spent heavily on premium perks. Instead of accelerating our growth, it dramatically raised our burn rate and left us scrambling before reaching product-market fit. How do you maintain a frugal, resourceful mindset across the company once fresh capital hits the bank account?
No first paying customer here yet, so this is less a story and more a suspicion I want to test.
When you start out, the first people you talk to are usually people who already like you. They re warm, they totally get it, and they say they d use it.
I m starting to think those conversations are great for learning and terrible for validating. People who like you are bad at telling you they won t pay.
When started I thought the best way to make progress was to keep shipping. If something wasn t working build a new version add the feature try another idea and keep moving. But after a while i noticed that moving too fast can create its own problems. Unfinished work piles up old decisions become harder to change and suddenly you re spending more time cleaning things up than actually moving forward. How do you know when you re moving fast enough and when slowing down would actually help you get further?
Hi guys, if the demo at a product launch dinner doesn't go well, due to some errors/issues, how do you deal with it? A lot of time is spent on invited investors, other company leads, prospective customers, etc. and it's disheartening when the demo doesn't go as planned. How to deal with this?
A dependency update the agent suggested worked locally and in CI. It broke production because the production environment had a different version of a peer dependency. The agent checked package.json. It didn't check what was actually installed.
Now I run npm ls after any dependency change and compare against the lockfile. What's a green build that lied?
Two pricing headlines, 30 days, 22,000 visitors. Headline A won signup clicks: 14.2% vs 11.8%. I shipped A.
Three months later: Headline B produced 22% higher revenue per visitor. Fewer signups, better customers. I optimized for the wrong metric at the start. Has anyone else had a conversion "winner" that lost on revenue?
The agent added a test for a bug fix. I reverted the fix and ran the test. It passed. The assertion was checking a mock that always returned true, regardless of the code.
I now revert every fix before trusting the test. If the test passes without the fix, the test is decoration. Has anyone else caught the agent writing tests that can't fail?
