Dax Raad

Their words

every week i see a new benchmark that ranks claude code last and everyone pats themselves on the back for not using claude code and being "smarter" and it's still #1 and still growing faster than most of the other things on the list this has been going on for a year

Their words

muse spark 1.3 reminding me how much i missed fast models

Their words

I still believe quality is a huge differentiator. It's not just something you can decide to do. I think it needs to show up every single aspect of your company from like you have to do things that are irrational. I think that's kind of what quality comes from. like you do a bunch of things and like 50% of those things you you didn't have to do and I think very few people are willing to operate that way.

Their words

The job of product isn't to just receive a problem and ship the immediate solution. It's to absorb all the problems and understand that there's one solution you can ship to fix 50 different problems.

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You probably only have one good idea in your whole product. Get the user to experience that as fast as possible. Well, it sounds so easy, but if you go try every single product out there, you will see a million accidental steps they introduced from the user hearing about your product to like seeing the value in it.

Their words

It's like everyone is just saying mantras to themselves cuz the root thing that's going on here is we are experiencing a moment of great change. Everyone is very nervous about what that means for their own position in it. a defense mechanism is to confidently assert a future in which you're a winner. And that's almost what every single prediction that you see is happening.

Their words

That prickle that feeling that you get, it's like muted now cuz someone else it's kind of like you've made someone else deal with the problem. The problem is still there and the the landmines are still going to blow up on you eventually, but like you're not you don't feel that bad feeling as much anymore. So your judgment is skewed. You're not getting that feedback loop.

Their words

That judgment, that ability to have that judgment is so distorted right now because the agent will just do the hacky thing for you. The agent will kind of deal with the hacky problems that come down the road. And it's way easier just to be like, "Oh yeah, it's a temporary fix."

Their words

the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.

Their words

there is a world where the net result of all these AI coding tools is the same amount of work gets done, but all the engineers are happier because their job is easier. That's not good enough for a lot of companies. So, they're just going to say go back to typing out the code.

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You give them a button that lets them do their work faster. The natural place for them to do is hit that button as much as possible, do the same amount of work, and just cash in that extra time, right? Which makes total sense.

Their words

The demand for inference is growing. So, like I don't think it's linearly growing. I think it might even be exponentially growing. But we haven't made our production of GPUs grow exponentially. That's like kind of a linear process. So as those lines intersect, there's going to be uh tightening.

Their words

There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.

Their words

cuz because we rent GPUs at scale to run the models and we still use middleman by the way. So we're not like going all the way down to the down to the floor. Even for us there are some models the sticker price and the cost to us there's like an 80% margin in there.

Their words

And our harness wasn't very good for like the first like five months of open code. But it was good enough. It was good enough that most people couldn't really tell a difference. And once we won enough share, then we went back and like tried to make our harness like good and smart and optimize and all those things. But uh it was inverted from what everybody else was doing. Everybody else was being like you have to build the smartest harness and that's how you win.

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The the biggest advantage to in DevTools is the fact that everyone working at DevTools is a programmer and programmers are horrible at B2C products. They don't realize DevTools are B2C products.

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every single dev tool we use whether it's databases, compilers, whatever eventually the open source option becomes a default option, right?

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If you get your positioning right, the world just keeps handing you wins that you didn't even expect. So like we never predicted this exact scenario but like our fundamental understanding of the position was right. like if if there is a neutral party, all these companies with billions of dollars will kind of use a neutral party to advance their own like company's interests.

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the strategy that we know how to play really well is to pick one temporary bad guy and then galvanize all their competitors to push something forward against them.

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none of our competitors are crushing us either. Like no one out there is using AI so well that they just like we can't even compete, right? Um, and we're in the coding agent space. All our competitors are super into AI. So you would think in our space there would be like uh a huge gap, but there there just isn't.

Their words

The moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.

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If you add that up, you think, "Oh, we shipped a thousand features. Now that adds it to a good product." It actually adds it to a horrible product.

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But I've always thought it's better to think a lot instead of swinging a lot. I think you could you can eliminate a lot of ideas or directions just by, you know, spending a lot of time in your head and with your team talking. Um, obviously AI doesn't speed that part up.