The cool thing though is that I could have chosen to do something else, too. I’m not at a loss for fulfilling, productive things to do. AI won’t change that.

I actually had to think really, really hard to keep up with the idiot savant as it cranked out code.

Correctness was extremely important for this feature. Claude would consistently make subtle mistakes, and I needed to catch them to keep things from going off the rails. I could have done it myself, but it would have taken MUCH longer.

I essentially compressed a week’s worth of work into a few hours, and my brain paid the price.

So yeah. You can use AI to replace your thinking, or you can use it to push yourself to your max potential.

What holds me back is knowing that -- if this was an iPad app, for example -- I'd be at the mercy of both Google AND Apple. It's a minefield of sensitive topics:

- Kids & privacy

- Content moderation

- Intellectual property

- Third-party UGC

Way too risky.

Are you doing anything special to leverage TikTok or Instagram Reels? I notice you had a few sample posts. I'd go hard on that if you're not already: post yourself, hire micro influencers, etc.

- Lenny's newsletter. While lately it's become mostly about how to succeed as a PM in Big Tech, he occasionally covers juicy startup tactics. For example, "What is good retention?" was solid gold.

- Casey Newton's Platformer. Balanced and insightful coverage of breaking industry news

- Data Analysis Journal. Goes deep on many growth topics, with tons of real SQL code from an experienced practitioner, which is extremely hard to find.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/ https://www.platformer.news/ https://dataanalysis.substack.com/

Looking back at the last year, are you (or your users) happy with the time spent using the product? Do you/they regret it?

Juicing short-term engagement can be effective for startups, but it isn't everything, and doesn't necessarily lead to lasting value.

When Wrapped came out a few days ago, virtually every person I follow on IG had shared their Spotify Wrapped. It's phenomenal marketing.

https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/20135760/kokonas-know-...

If I recall correctly, the version that beat Lee Sedol was trained on amateur games plus self-play. My guess would be that this new version relies more heavily on pro games.

For example, most people only have a handful of recent conversations; can you get away with ignoring distant-past conversations when it comes to read/unread marking? If so, you could send recent normalized data to the frontend and let it derive the unread state client-side. React has some nice tools for efficiently deriving state from server-sent data.

This isn't always the best solution, but it's something to consider.

Google tends to release code and promote it without really using it much internally first. Documentation is prolific but confusingly organized and often fragmented among several versions simultaneously (cough, Google Analytics).

Facebook, on the other hand, actually seems to use their code before releasing and promoting it. Look at how they handled GraphQL: spec and reference implementation released a year ago, clearly labeled as a "Technology Preview". A lot of design work went into it before that, informed by the problems of internal product teams. Only a few days ago was it promoted as ready for production. The spec hardly changed it the last year. Documentation is good, and they work with the community to improve DX.

Why the difference? Hard to say, but my feeling is that there's a more direct link between Facebook's product-driven open source work and their bottom line. There are other startups constantly nipping at their heels, so they need to be on their game product-wise. Better code -> better products -> profits.

Google is largely impervious in the search and ad space, which is their cash cow. It almost doesn't matter how good or bad their other products are. The company is not at risk. Their open source work reflects that.

EDIT: Additionally, I'm not saying React Router is bad per se, just that it's not fully baked. I'm glad to see people working on the problem. I look forward to leveraging the fruits of their labor in the future (in fact, I already do - I use the history library on which RR is built).

What I wrote wasn't entirely in response to the HN thread. Similar thoughts about the JS community have been brewing for a while and the discussion prompted me to speak my mind.