Tag

#product

October 6, 20264 min read

Telling users the truth about ingest time

In short: a tool that runs local models on a laptop is slow at bulk work, and a large photo import can run for hours, often overnight. I put that sentence near the top of the setup guide, before the…

August 11, 20265 min read

What happens when the AI goes down mid-session

In short: when the model provider fails mid-sentence, the user sees whatever the companion had already said, followed by a calm, pre-written pause line. Their unanswered question is held, and the next…

June 30, 20265 min read

Why the service speaks English to everyone

In short: the supervised care companion speaks English to every participant because every line it says in a hard moment has to be signed off by a clinician, and a translation is a new text that nobody…

June 16, 20265 min read

Warm intros from a graph: shortest path between two people

In short: put people and the organisations they belong to in one graph, and "who can introduce me" becomes a shortest-path query. I built a small demo of this on public Wikidata records for about six…

May 19, 20265 min read

Fail closed: designing an AI for people who can't afford a bad answer

In short: when the user can't afford a bad answer, every part of the system that can fail has to fail towards the safe answer, not towards the model. In a supervised care product I'm building, a voice…

February 10, 20264 min read

The AI feature that cut churn, and the one that didn't

In short: on a platform product I led AI on, a round of AI features came with lower churn and higher feature adoption. Those are two different measures, and a feature can win one without touching the…

January 27, 20264 min read

What the buyer actually bought

In short: I sold my startup and its technology, and I do not think the buyer was paying for clever code. They were paying for the parts that keep the product working without me: the pipeline that…

December 30, 20254 min read

Building a product alone: what I automated, what I did by hand

In short: running a company of one, I automated anything that repeated and had a clear right answer, like deploys, billing and checking the retrieval pipeline. I kept doing by hand anything where the…

December 2, 20255 min read

Recommending books by mood: a small LLM product in a day

In short: you type how you feel, and the app gives you three books, three meals and three things to do. It is one prompt, one API route and one screen, and it took a day because I wrote down what it…

October 7, 20255 min read

Leaving a job to build: the first two weeks

In short: I've left my job at a medical AI company to build my own product, alone. I gave myself two weeks of setup before any product code: a one-page brief, accounts with budget alarms, a deploy…

September 23, 20255 min read

Ideas are cheap. Working software isn't.

In short: an idea gets a weekend from me when I can name the person who would use it, the one thing it has to do, and how I'll know by Sunday night whether it works. If I can't write those three…

July 29, 20255 min read

Classical ML or an LLM? The decision before touching code

In short: if the input is numbers or a signal and you have labelled examples, I start with a classical model. If the input is language and the job is to read or write it, I start with an LLM. Most of…

May 20, 20255 min read

Most AI never leaves the notebook

In short: most models die between the demo and the first real user, and rarely because the model was bad. They die because nobody owns them, the real data looks different, the metric doesn't match a…

October 22, 20244 min read

Three things big tech does that startups should copy, and three they shouldn't

In short: copy the demo culture, the habit of measuring what users actually feel, and the discipline of writing ideas down properly. Don't copy the approval layers, the urge to build for every device…