While building an AI-powered interview platform, I initially found myself adding more and more AI features because they seemed useful individually.

Eventually, i had to think much more carefully about which features genuinely improve the user's experience vs which ones simply make the product look more impressive.

For other makers building AI products, how did you decide which AI features to keep, simplify, or remove?

Not a launch post. Just things I wish someone had written down before I spent a month figuring them out.

1. LLMs send partial payloads on write operations

You ask the agent to update a record. It sends only the fields you mentioned in the prompt. The PUT request goes through, returns 200, and you've silently wiped every field you didn't specify.

The fix: before every write call, fetch the current resource state via the companion GET endpoint and deep-merge the LLM's payload on top. The LLM only needs to specify what's changing the executor fills in the rest.

Even back in university, I noticed how much younger people (17 or 18 years old) were always jumping into some kind of trendy business model or income stream that happened to be booming at the time.

• First, it was dropshipping and flipping items.

• Then came NFTs and everything happening in the crypto space.

• Now everyone seems obsessed with quick vibecoded AI solutions and investment apartments.

At 15 I trained my first machine learning model and landed an internship at a U.S. company.
At 16 I launched my first startup and promptly ran it into the ground.
I learned more from that failure.

At 17 I launched Pleep, an AI sales rep that lets any business owner integrate AI into their sales workflow in under five minutes. Four months later I quit my job to work on it full time.

Why bother? I kept asking myself: Why isn t there an AI sales monopoly yet? My take: because most competitors deliver AI consultants that talk like robots and kill revenue.
We focused on building a real rep that:

• Doesn t ask you to prompt or pick an LLM you just tell us about your business and we do the rest.

• Talks like your top salesperson, not a bot.

• Books meetings and pushes data back into your CRM.

I've been thinking about how much modern internet design is built around getting us to do something.

Social platforms want us to keep scrolling. Productivity apps want us to maintain streaks. Games want us to keep progressing. Even many wellness apps turn relaxation into something we need to track and optimize.

As someone who builds digital products, I've started wondering whether we sometimes confuse engagement with a good user experience.

Is a product still successful if someone uses it for five minutes and leaves feeling better, rather than staying for an hour?

Every client conversation this quarter eventually lands on the same question. Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend us. We can never answer it properly, because the measurement underneath is broken.

Referrers from ChatGPT and Perplexity are inconsistent, a lot of it arrives as direct traffic, and so the honest answer to "how many of our signups touched an AI tool first" is usually that we don't know.

More and more, my friends on Twitter are sharing their Reddit successes. They
either have decent "vanity metrics" but also brag about getting real
customers.
I have a few subReddits where you can create a discussion around your products
(I am sharing them below) but do not recommend doing "salesy" marketing. Just
take it like a space where you exchange experiences and ideas because
trustworthy and connections are done this way. Otherwise, you are banned :)

r/Accounting

r/advancedentrepreneur

r/b2bmarketing

For a time our template directory pages were just a grid of images with titles and download buttons. We thought users just wanted to see the templates away so we kept the design as simple as possible.

The issue was that search engines had no text to read to figure out what the page was really about. We were appearing on the page for our main keywords and our organic traffic stayed the same for six months.

We stopped making templates for a week and went back to update our top twenty category pages. We added a three-sentence introduction at the top of each page that explained exactly what the templates were for and who should use them.

We also added a frequently asked questions section at the bottom to answer common technical questions. In than forty days those specific category pages had a forty-five percent rise in organic search visits.

What I like about tech culture or marketing is that it tends to be more relaxed. At least in my experience, I ve always had a very open and friendly relationship with CEOs.

But the bigger the company, the more distant the CEO tends to be from the team members.

(For example, it s much easier to remember everyone s name in a flat structure with 14 people than in a large corporation where a manager manages a manager who manages someone else and has dozens of people under them. You get me.)