Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779081

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Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.

Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.

Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.

These are CEOs who have raised $1M+ pre-seed.

I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.

After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.

Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.

The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

In the best cases, they were able to reach funding or paying users. Architecture debt is one of the worst kinds of tech debt, so if you set it up right, it’s really hard to mess up.

In the worst case, after my contract ended, the CEO fired the whole US engineering team and replaced them with offshore resources. This was an example of messing up despite the architectural and procedural safeguards we built.

Having the AI ask me questions and think about the PRD/spec ultimately made me a better system designer.

If you have control over the recommendation system, you could deliberately feed it contrarian and diverse sources. Or you could choose to be very constrained. Back in RSS days, if you were lazy about it, your taste/knowledge was dependent on other people's curation and biases.

Progress happens through trends anyway. Like in 2010s, there was just a lot of Rails content. Same with flat design. It wasn't really group think, it just seemed to happen out of collective focus and necessity. Everyone else was talking/doing this so if you wanted to be a participant, you have to speak the language.

My original principle when I was using Google Reader was I didn't really know enough to have strong opinions on tech or design, so I'll follow people who seem to have strong opinions. Over time I started to understand what was good design, even if it wasn't something I liked. The rate of taste development was also faster for visual design because you could just quickly scan through an image, vs with code/writing you'd have to read it.

I did something interesting with my Last.fm data once. I've been tracking my music since 2009. Instead of getting recommendations based on my preferences, I could generate a list of artists that had no or little overlap with my current library. It was pure exploration vs exploitation music recommendation. The problem was once your tastes get diverse enough, it's hard to avoid overlaps.

Recently, I was inspired to do this on my entire browsing history, after reading https://labs.rs/en/browsing-histories/ I also did the same from ChatGPT/Claude conversation history. The most terrifying thing I did was having an LLM look at my Reddit comment history.

The challenges are primarily with having a context window large enough and tracking context from various data sources. One approach I am exploring is using a knowledge graph to keep track of a user's profile. You're able to compress behavioral patterns into queryable structures, though the graph construction itself becomes a computational challenge. Recently most of the AI startups I've worked with have just boiled down to "give an LLM access to a vector DB and knowledge graph constructed from a bunch of text documents". The text docs could be invoices, legal docs, tax docs, daily reports, meeting transcripts, code.

I'm hoping we see an AI personal content recommendation or profiling system pop up. The economic incentives are inverted from big tech's model. Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility. During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas. It also helped me connect with cool, interesting people.

There's an app I like https://www.dimensional.me/ but the MBTI and personality testing approach could be more rigorous. Instead of personality testing, imagine if you could feed a system everything you consume, write, and do on digital devices, and construct a knowledge graph about yourself, constantly updating.

We’re building an AI-powered home manager: a proactive, chat-first system that helps homeowners stay ahead of bills, maintenance, documents, and expenses.

We're backed by founders of Freshly ($1.5B), Kustomer ($1B), and more.

What we're building:

- Structured parsing of home docs (insurance, warranties, bills)

- Personalized maintenance schedules

- Expense tracking with home-specific insights

- Natural language interface

- Embedded payments + smart renewal workflows

You’ll:

- Lead development of user-facing features with React, TypeScript, CSS

- Build elegant UIs for AI-driven workflows

- Design new UI paradigms for LLM-powered assistants

- Own frontend architecture and contribute to product strategy

- Optimize for responsiveness, performance, accessibility

Requirements:

- 3+ years experience in frontend development

- Strong with React, TypeScript, modern CSS

- UX focus with portfolio of polished, intuitive interfaces

- Experience with design systems and collaborating closely with product/design

Bonus:

- Experience with LLMs or AI interfaces

- Background in productivity tools or intelligent assistants

Contact: panat@cassihome.com

Mention you found us on HN! We’re also hiring for product manager, full-stack, and ML roles.

Once I am in the clear, I’d be happy to open source the process of acquiring a SMB and running it. I basically become a business broker myself for this one deal, thanks to the broker I worked with.