kadhirvelm

I still feel like we're on track for more and more products to become undifferentiated and degrade in quality over time, if we keep this up. I think we'll rebound the other way at some point and the folks who've always been super valuable, the people who can work up and down the product from customer calls to design to engineering, will become even more valuable over time. Aka, these are the people who can differentiate your company from generic AI

Wow that was a fascinating experience - honestly the biggest revelation for me is how much I skim content without realizing it. Reading and remembering every single word, one at a time, and comprehending what was being said was more effort than I expected! I also took away how much I need the inter-word formatting to keep track of what's being said

Do you think having an AI do that is 1) possible and 2) people will like that? Seems really invasive, no?

Do you all rely on people writing things down as they go? or do you have some automated system?

Yeah man, I think this exactly captures what I've been feeling - every time I need to get something done, I consistently hit some experience breaking bug. And you're totally right, I've actually just come to expect it and work around it...

Do you think in the future apps that are stable and "just work" will be a moat? Feels like the direction we're trending in.

We've been finding that as engineering becomes less about the code itself, it becomes more about deciding what to build. Which in our experience is limited by creativity more than anything else. What has everyone else's experience of these shifts been?

Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time

This is awesome, we wanted an offline copy of someone’s prototype (as built on Lovable, etc) so we could do version control and sharing in an easier format. Wrote our approach here: https://productnow.ai/blogs/extracting-html-from-ai-prototyp...

But will look into this now, see if we can swap some stuff out. We’ve really liked the idea of an offline mirror, makes a lot of collaboration use cases simpler

The surprising part was that “AI-generated prototype” is not a single artifact type. Some tools emitted clean standalone HTML, some produced Vite/React apps that needed bundling and asset inlining, and some depended on hosted runtimes or CDNs enough that they weren’t truly portable. The result was 6 fully offline files, 1 HTTP-served case, and several tools that were effectively not self-contained.

I wish, but maybe it’s more fair to say how people think has changed. It’s like for these complex questions, they can break the problem down quickly into smaller functions, but implementing the functions is slow? Sometimes a non-starter? Idk, it’s different. Our old ways of interviewing aren’t working the same

We’ve added collaboration and communication as big facets in our hiring loop rubrics, and reduced the complexity of our questions. We also tell candidates this ahead of time - been honestly working pretty well so far, it indexes more on those soft skills and gives us just enough insight into the hard skills to make a call.

We’ve also been increasingly finding very few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol. How are other folks changing their loops these days?

Disclosure: I wrote this as a founder of ProductNow. The last couple of sections highlight what we're building, so I wanted to be upfront about that. Though the broader thesis that software is becoming a utility and the physical world is the next frontier is something I think about all the time, independent of the company. I deeply feel that software is just a means to an end, so can we get back to solving problems that matter, here in the physical world? Curious what this community thinks, especially where the argument breaks down.

The single file is interesting, we’ve been observing something similar too. Do you have a specific prompt that you load in by default to make this work? Are these react files, or just pure HTML/JS/CSS? Aka do you compile it via Esbuild or webpack or something, or are you asking the model to generate something that works out of the box?

We’ve been seeing Claude artifacts sometimes come out as JSX or TSX

Sad

What are people doing with prototypes afterward? Do you end up shipping it as is to production? What about at work? Are the prototypes useful in that context?

I think we need to look past software and spend more time and energy on the physical world. Let the digital world just be a means to an end, and we spend more time and resources on problems that matter. Reallocate societal attention to the next frontier

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot! Wrote a post on it a little while ago: https://productnow.ai/blogs/write-for-human-download-time

But I really agree with use AI to make your communication sharper. I think a lot of us, especially in corporate settings could use the help

Btw these posts are embedded documents from ProductNow. Been experimenting with more 2-way communication between writers and readers. What do you think? Useful?

Curious how other's have been driving alignment on their teams. We've been finding as AI sped things up, keeping people in sync has been increasingly challenging. We personally have found a doc-driven culture has been super helpful - what are other's trying?

Didn't quite get around to open sourcing the code, but I have some code snippets in there in case someone else is inspired enough to try. Curious what other's think? Seem like a fun genre?

Whoop sorry, should be back now

Yeah I like that, there’s probably something to this full stack builder persona that could keep people motivated long term. So long as they feel ownership, seems like that’s a pretty good bet for long term engagement

Curious what other teams are doing to keep encouraging people to think critically about their code? I’ve been finding it harder to keep people motivated, keep them engaged with all the changes coming in. And I can’t blame them, it’s been overwhelming. Is everyone else just using more AI..?

Totally agree, we wrote our own piece similar to this: https://productnow.ai/blogs/teams-that-coordinate

I really think as code becomes cheap, misalignment between people, teams, and organizations is going to hurt a lot more, especially when everyone is trying to move at break neck speeds.

I also think a big piece of this is human attention and inertia. Aka, why bother doing the hard work to coordinate with others when you can just ship whatever you’re thinking. I think whichever organizations can figure out the human and cultural aspects to this will do phenomenally

Honestly I kind of feel for them - their traffic must be spiking like no tomorrow. Though still annoying when the team takes down time because GitHub is down...has anyone transitioned to something else successfully?

We don’t think AI vs human authorship is as much of a problem at slop vs not slop is. To break through the noise, we’ve started optimizing our docs on human download time

I can't imagine going from reviewing code in Zig to letting Claude code handle it in Rust. Seems like a lot of change to deal with in a short amount of time. Wonder how much the bun team culture will change? We've been really liking bun so far

As AI wrote more and more of our code, we found the speed came at a steep cost: we were constantly misaligned even as a small team. It was just too much to keep track of. So we switched to a doc driven development culture and found a lot more success in keeping the stack stable and maintaining feature velocity.

We are a doc-driven development team. No major feature ships without a clean RFC attached to it. It sounds like overhead, but in practice it's been one of the highest-leverage investments we've made.

Honestly my hope is the arbitrage that allowed big tech to make the kind of margins it does on software starts to go away because it’s sooo cheap to build software. In other words, defending the technical moats that we rely on today doesn’t make sense in the future because it’s not a reliable way to make money. Aka no need to protect your technical secrets because there’s no capitalist reason to lol. Taken further, my naive hope is societal attention moves away from this layer and onto whatever becomes the new way to make money and the people left paying attention to software are big on sharing