The AI gold rush feels like it rewards teams who ship fast. Many teams are working on a 9-9-6 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) schedule to keep up with the state of the art breakthroughs and features. Does this give teams an edge against their competition or is this slowly burning teams out.
If you're building in the AI space, I would love to hear what your take is:

• What works for your team and do you follow the 996 schedule?

• Did following a 996 culture create more bugs or actually lead to breakthroughs and push you ahead of your competition?

• How would you balance your life outside of work if you followed this schedule?

Making this post to raise awareness and ideally find a middle ground for teams that are currently growing and trying to keep up with the competition

As developers, it s easy to fall into the I could just code this in a weekend mindset.

But I ve realized time, maintenance, and support often cost way more than the price of the tool.

Still, sometimes I just can t justify paying for something I know I could make.

Hello friends, and welcome back to the changelog. The devs have been running on a balanced diet of espresso shots and questionable amounts of energy drinks, which means you guessed it: fresh updates are here. From saying goodbye to Coming Soon, to giving you a shiny red self-destruct button, to sprucing up Alternatives, and a shiny new footer, we ve packed a lot into this round.

Coming Soon Forum Threads

The old Coming Soon pages have officially retired (and you lot noticed). From now on, every new product you create gets its own forum thread. It is your place to share updates, drop teasers, or just shout into the void while you wait for launch day. People can still follow from your forum page to get notified when you go live, but now you can actually start the conversation early.

Every time I hit a small problem, I face the same choice: find a tool that already does it, or build my own quick fix. Building feels exciting, but I m not sure it s the smart choice.

Last month I spent a whole weekend setting up my own system to track my reading list. It worked, but a free app I d skipped would have done 90% of it in ten minutes. I still can t tell if the weekend was wasted or if I learned enough to make it worth it.

It made me wonder if I ll just build it myself is often a way of avoiding the boring work of searching for what already exists.

How do you decide between building and using something that already exists? Has building your own ever paid off, or did you end up wishing you d just used the existing tool?

Last month a paying user asked for a feature that would directly contradict the main use case of a product I work on. Not a small addition a change that would make it worse for every other user. I said no politely. He didn't cancel but he also stopped giving feedback and I've been second guessing that decision since.

The part nobody talks about is that "sticking to your vision" sounds clean in theory but in practice it means watching a paying user go quiet and not knowing if you were right.

So for those who've been in this exact spot: when a paying user asks for something that goes against a product's core do you say no and risk losing them or add it and risk the product? And the harder question: what did you actually do the last time it happened not what you think you should have done?

Last quarter I raised the price of a small subscription tool I work on from $19 to $27 per month, about 40%. I braced for cancellations. Zero. Not one. But something else changed: the people who used to email asking for discounts just stopped emailing and the new signups pay full price without asking.

I think price is a filter not just revenue. A low price attracts people who doubt the value a higher price attracts people who've already decided. The bargainers weren't the best customers, they were the most expensive ones in support time.

So for those who've raised prices significantly: did your "annoying" customers disappear too,or did you just get lucky with a small sample? And the harder follow up: if you lost customers what was the actual churn rate and did the revenue still go up?

I review content for my project every week and last month I rejected 12 AI generated drafts. Not because they were bad, but because they were too smooth. Every paragraph was balanced, every sentence polished, nothing left unresolved.

The test I used was simple: I looked for a sentence that trailed off an opinion that might be wrong, a thought that wasn't fully closed. AI doesn't leave loose ends, humans do. That one difference gave away all 12.

So for those who review content regularly: do you have a specific signal that tells you "this is AI" before you finish reading or do you rely on gut feeling? And the harder question: if you can't explain the signal, is it actually a signal or just a bias?

There are countless products and services out there, and I ll admit I sign up for more than I probably should. But I usually stop using them for a few common reasons:

1. It doesn t actually fit my needs

2. The company feels unreliable or opaque

3. The value doesn t justify the cost

After spending my career in enterprise software, I ve noticed that many of these issues aren t just product problems, they re relationship problems.

When companies show a bit of intention, clarity, and care, trust goes up. When they don t, everything feels disposable, even good tools.