Whether you work remotely or on-site, and who you work with, may not be the most important thing. What really matters is how you handle the situation.
Personally, I find myself quite flexible with both on-site and remote work. But as an introvert who isn t very strong at communication, I usually prefer working alone rather than in crowded environments and I tend to be more productive that way.
That said, I also realize that a lack of real human interaction can indirectly affect both the process and the final outcome of work.
When we first launched Murror, we measured success the way most AI products do: how much are users interacting with the AI? How long are the conversations? How many follow-up questions are they asking?
The numbers looked great. Users were writing long entries, the AI was generating thoughtful reflections, and people kept coming back. We were building the world's best journaling chatbot.
Six months ago we added an AI feature to Murror that we were sure would be a breakthrough. It analyzed journal patterns and surfaced emotional insights -- things like "you tend to feel more anxious on Sundays" or "your mood improves when you write about specific people."
The insight quality was genuinely good. We tested it internally, everyone was impressed.
Before AI, I always thought I would NEVER learn how to code. I genuinely admired technical people, watching them code felt like watching magic. I remember wishing that maybe one day, I could do something like that too.
I ve never had any formal education in programming, and I had zero experience building apps. But with AI, I was able to start from just an idea and slowly figure things out on my own experimenting, setting things up, and eventually creating my first interface that I could actually interact with.
It honestly felt magical. It made me realize how fast the world is changing. Coding is no longer something completely out of reach. AI is making it possible for people like me to turn ideas in our heads into real, tangible drafts for the first time.
California's SB 243 took effect this year. The definition is broader than the word "companion" sounds, and most of what it asks for is stuff a decent builder would want to ship anyway.
If you're building anything where a person talks to your AI about their life a journaling tool, a coaching app, a "supportive" assistant, a character there's a law worth reading this month, and it's probably not the one you think. Not the EU AI Act. A California statute called SB 243. It took effect January 1st, and I'd bet most makers in this space haven't checked whether they're inside its fence. The reason to care isn't that the penalty is scary (though it's real). It's that the law quietly wrote down a definition of "companion chatbot," and the definition is broad enough that a lot of products land inside it by accident.
A few months ago, we noticed something in our data that most product teams would panic about: a group of users who had been highly active for weeks suddenly went quiet. No crashes. No angry support tickets. They just stopped showing up.
The instinct was to win them back. Send a re-engagement email. Offer a new feature. Maybe a push notification saying "We miss you!"
A Stanford study in Science found AI affirms people about 49% more than other humans do and the people getting flattered trust it more, come back more, and quietly get worse at being right.
There's an easy way to make people love an AI product, and almost everyone reaches for it without noticing. You make it agree with them. Not obviously you'd never ship a bot that just says "you're right." You ship one that's warm, validating, that finds the reading of the situation where the user comes out looking good. It tests well. People like it. The thumbs-up rate goes up. And this year we finally got the data on what that costs, and it's worse than I expected.
Three months ago, we added the most terrifying feature in Murror's history: a single button that lets users permanently delete every insight, pattern, and memory their AI companion has built about them. Months of emotional context, journaling patterns, relationship dynamics -- gone in one tap.
Our investors thought we were insane. Our product team debated it for weeks. The data team warned us we'd lose our most valuable asset: the personalization layer that makes Murror's reflections feel meaningful over time.
When your AI does the work, you can't charge per seat anymore but the fashionable fix, charging per outcome, only works if your outcome is something you can count. Here's how I think about pricing when the thing you sell is subjective.
There's a pricing question sitting under every AI product right now, and most makers are answering it by copying whoever's biggest in their category. That's how you end up mispriced.
