I hate these “AI saved me $” posts… but.
Had a big online order for new dishes and told Muse to buy it for me as a test. It found a 20% code in some Reddit thread, tested it, worked. Saved me $500. I didn’t even ask it to do this.
Next Shopify app: find every discount code you forgot was still enabled. There are probably a shitload of 0day discount exploits sitting in everyone’s store. Go shop quickly before its shutdown!
But yea, Muse payed for itself?!
"Let’s plan the roadmap for next quarter” is the modern day equivalent of “let’s fax everyone the strategy.”
We're going into q4 planning and it makes my brain hurt. Roadmaps existed because software was expensive to build. You needed a bunch of people. Meetings. Someone moving little boxes around Jira for three months from now. It makes no sense and I'm trying to work out what we call the replacement. Maybe just "Continuous Compilation", ideas just compile to working product. I want a list of ideas that we want to continuously compile. That's the roadmap now.
The cheapest way to figure out whether something is a good idea is often to just build the fucking thing.
Here’s how I work now. I've done this weekly over the last few months and it works. My current napkin math is that I can usually build 6 months of old-school roadmap in a week. Sometimes more. I've also hit a wall sometimes. It happens.
When we have an idea, I usually 10x the ambition and then write a prompt, not more than a page long, that basically says:
- here’s the ambitious goal
- here are a few use cases
- here’s roughly how I think we should build it in terms of where it fits into code base, design considerations, etc..
- here’s how we’ll know if it actually works
- now go fucking surprise me
Agents build all night. Not even with a crazy factory or complex agent or agents. The base models are just too good for that now.
In the morning I look at it. Ok, they usually build in a few hours. Usually some of it is great. Some of it is stupid. Some of it exposes that my original idea was wrong.
And almost every time it gives me 5 new ideas I couldn’t have planned upfront. So we throw shit out. Who cares? We learned something.
Then we change direction and send them off again. It usually takes 3 rounds before the shape appears and we've learned about the gremlins and possibilities.
95% of the time I end up building something with 10x the scope of what somebody had carefully spread across the next quarter in Jira.
“What should we put on the roadmap for next quarter?”
My brain now translates that to: “Oh, you're stuck in the 1500s”
Still sharing this with friends and colleagues….The lens by which you see problems is the most direct contributor to your happiness in life:
1) either you expect problems to go away, 2) or you expect problems to upgrade