"Any time saved by (their) AI prompting gets consumed by verification overhead, the work just gets passed along to someone else – in this case me." ammil.industries/i-know-you-d...

"For the majority of AI-native companies, ARR isn’t really ARR as we know it, but rather a hotchpotch of one-off, credits-based, performance-based or outcome-based revenue contracts." pitchbook.com/news/article...

I saw this: VC fundraising can't keep up (they get less and less money over time). 1st thought: How does Sam Altman get another fat round of investment? 2nd thought: He sure will get his. At the expense of the mass of small-to-medium aspiring startups, which will be starved.

VC: "99% of the market doesn't know how niche the VC product is. So burn loads of time pitching for a poor fit product instead of building." And yet, we picture the startup ecosystem as if going for VC money was almost the only way.

Is the AI revolution gendered? Looking from the 2021 investment peak, we have fewer and fewer female founders. Compared with purely male leadership teams, the gap is growing year by year. Coincidentally, that's precisely when VCs jumped on the AI bandwagon.

"The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is that you don’t know you're IN Dunning-Kruger club." @derekwwade.bsky.social

Unpopular opinion: Current code review tools just don’t make much sense for AI-generated code When reviewing code I really want to know: - The prompt made by the dev - What corrections the other dev made to the code - Clear marking of code AI-generated not changed by a human

Watch software developers. I mean *really* watch them. When they say they spent an hour "writing code", they've actually spent most of that hour *reading* code and *thinking* about it. Wanna boost your dev productivity? * Write code that's easier to understand * Get better at understanding code

"When UX, reliability, security and maintainability matter, we’re forced to drink from the firehose one mouthful at a time, taking deep breaths between so as not to let it overwhelm us. When you’re drinking from a firehose, the limit isn’t the firehose." codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/t...

"It may be that the real winner [of the AI race] is whichever country doesn’t overextend itself to the point of financial ruin" open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

"I built 3 products last week" is, by definition, a lie. One might have built (prompted their way to) 3 experiments or prototypes. But these are not products. Product does not equal code.

"You think that because you wrote 'Clean the Garage' on a sticky note, you are legally obligated to clean the garage before the heat death of the universe." by @ourfounder.bsky.social substack.com/inbox/post/1...

As a founder, how should I treat AI features? Less-than-thrilling, but honest answer: treat AI features the same way as any other capabilities. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/ai-feature...

Took a look at startup funding data. Since 2021, the heyday number of deals has declined (duh!) What's interesting: - for purely male-led teams, it's down by 18% - for teams with a female in leadership, it's down by 32% And 2025 will be even worse.

We'd be better off with more Warren Buffetts and fewer Mark Zuckerbergs.

Shopify famously went all-in with AI. Results? Revenues up. Margins up. Headcount down. Except it's all bullshit. Layoffs happened in 2022-23 and were a consequence of the COVID years' wild overhiring. AI all-in was announced in 2025. Connect the dots yourself before signing up for official spin.

I'm not interested in start-ups. I'm interested in stay-ups.

Would you pay to have your resume read by an actual human? Seriously, would you? In AI hiring era, vast majority of applications are processed (ann rejected) by AI. So would you pay to bypass that filter for that job you genuinely care about? If so, how much? brodzinski.com/2025/12/pay-...

AI Age: The Age of Dimishing Trust It might be the single most consequential societal change brought to us by LLMs. We stop trusting things altogether.

Every expert beginner ever.

When people start ideating, they may have a humble opinion about what they know or understand. But then, knee-deep in exploration, toe-deep in development, they already believe they know oh so much. Except, at the peak of the "how much I think I know" curve, we make the worst decisions.

It would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad. We have broken education. Irrevocably, I'm afraid. archive.ph/e5BSM

Never thought about it this way. If there is a bubble and it bursts VCs still win. Actually, the bigger the hype, the more money VCs move, and the bigger their cut. VCs are incentivized to pump the bubble.

Me (on tech startups 10+ years time-to-profit): Do you know of a restaurant that’s been losing money for an entire decade, and yet remained open? Response: But restaurants lack scalability potential! Me: It's good, then, that no one told Harlan Sanders. Or Ray Kroc. Or Howard Schultz.

Mailchimp story: - started in 2001 (worst possible moment) - side hustle for founders for 6 years - paid from day 1 - company growth only as fast as revenues allowed - never took an investment They did *everything* differently from common "playbooks" - founders still sold for $12B after 20 years

If we think that waiting 10-15 years for a startup to show profitability is how "things have always been," well, let's think again. The norm has evolved and not in a healthy direction. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/time-to-pr...

The aspiration was "build a startup that will create a million jobs." Now, it is "build the first 10-person $100B company." That's a fundamentally different message. substack.com/home/post/p-...

One has to love Hacker News. "I haven't read this article but it's low quality and full of errors." I think this comment might have a basic error in it, perhaps.

When I'm reading posts about software development, I have to keep reminding myself that the best devs are usually well aware of their limitations, and the worst often aren't.

Double diamond is a standard for ideation/discovery work in product dev. As we use it, I realize that, despite its openness, it primes us to stick with the original idea, whatever it was. There are/should be multiple double diamonds at the same time. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/build-buil...

Musk: AI and human robotics will eliminate poverty and make everyone wealthy. Me: Yeah, true. Once it eliminates humans, there will literally be no poverty, and "everyone" will be wealthy. 😂

posted this 6 years ago and it’s still relevant

Shopify's ARR per employee soared thanks to AI. They have 30% fewer employees and doubled the revenue. Yeah... Except they fired 30% of people in 2022-23, before showing anything AI. They'd be so much better off if they avoided overrecruitment in the first place. It has nothing to do with AI.

"AI art is an interesting technology because despite its growing popularity, nobody seems to want it. Artists hate using it. Consumers hate consuming it. And yet it thrives." theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art by @theoatmeal.bsky.social

Few things speak "we don't even read these comments" as loud as leaving an open question in the feedback form and limiting it to like 200 characters. Good job, Spotify! Fortunately, I got some nice tunes as thanks... xD

Pro tip 1: If escalation is the only way to get competent customer support, people will escalate. Pro tip 2: If you escalate only when people are assholes to your consultants, they will act like assholes to get help.

AI support: Me: Stop resetting my password every other week AI: Here's how you can reset your password Me: I want to talk to a human AI: What do you want to do next? Me: Talk to a human AI: Do you want to talk to a human? Me: Yes Once I get to talk to a human, I'm gonna be pissed off, guaranteed.

If you develop a popup window to fill in a confirmation code, make sure you set focus on the entry field. There. You literally save a few seconds for just about any user for just about as many times as they're forced to interact with the form. Literally, 10s of work. No AI needed. Thank you.

Vibe-coded app. Authorization. "Add localhost:3000/auth/linkedi... to authorized redirect URLs" It is "works well on my machine" of the AI era :D

"Unlike 1999, tech’s profits justify the premium." Are these profits coming from AI? Save for hardware vendors, which AI wave made fly, what profits are we talking about? And what happens to Nvidia when it's suddenly clear that OpenAI isn't on a path to profitability? substack.com/inbox/post/1...

Just thought about it: an LLM is playing One Word Story except all the players are the LLM. bbbpress.com/2013/01/one-...

Hype wave versus reality. Upon seeing the chart, I was like: * Your ARR is not annual (can't be yet) * Nor is it recurring (can't know yet) After 10s research (literally clicking the links): * It's also fake * And scam Check your sources, people!

"We haven't yet shown a single dollar of profit, but we're already too big to fail." Welcome to 2025. What do you not understand?

Here's my little experiment on how proliferated LinkedIn is with automatic AI bots. I would appreciate sharing and/or reacting to it to increase its range: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... Thank you in advance.

@kentbeck.com's post (substack.com/inbox/post/1...) reminded me about my own "disastrous failure" story. In the end, our clients just ended up with a bit of extra work. Nothing too serious.

That didn't age overly well. It still somehow escapes me how these English developers build successful products.

For years, statistical forecasting was the way to go for me when someone asked for an estimate. Then I got back to simple linear approximation. TL;DR: It's much quicker. And good enough. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

My not-so-love letter to Lovable's stellar growth. TL;DR: Lovable's reported growth is a classic vanity metric, and it won't last. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/lovables-a...

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan

Linear announced "the best feature ever" which is Slack integration that automatically adds a work item based on AI interpreting the conversation. Well, so much for judgment in product development. That's a totally new level of AI slop. Work generated by AI for humans :)