Elliot C Smith

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Latest — 04 Nov 2026

Selling Picks, Building Systems

There's the old saying that the best thing to do in a gold rush is to sell picks and shovels. It's probably true to some extent. If you can sell the tool everyone needs then there's a fairly stable way to make some money.

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Flavors of Ambition

There's a post from Dan Luu that is currently going around titled "We should be more ambitious with the software we build". I really like the sentiment. I believe that we could all do with pushing a little further than we think we're capable,

Book Review(s): Ana and Din Mysteries

The Ana and Din Mysteries, currently three books starting with The Tainted Cup is a fantasy detective series that managed to tell both interesting detective stories and provide an interesting world in which they happen. I am typically a bit of a sucker for good world building. I love back

Outpacing the Spiral

Sometimes, especially if you spend a lot of time online, it can feel like everyone is moving faster than you. Folks post dozens of times a day about their main project, their side project and how they’ve automated their life and have more time than ever. Reading those stories

Engineering Theatre

There's a term I like: 'innovation theatre'. It's used to describe when a business does things that look like innovation but really aren't. Hackathons with no real meaning, giving someone a title like Head of Innovation. It's usually big corporate

Input based pricing vs Output based pricing

Usage based pricing is being talked about a lot lately. Partly due to changing unit economics for software but also because its trendy right now. One discussion I've had several times recently is about the difference in pricing user inputs and pricing user outputs. Both fall into the

Want taste? Eat your slop.

There are a lot of people now making software for the first time. In many ways it's wonderful. We have to admit however, that the raw volume of bad software has gone up. We seem to call that bad software slop these days. Well, we seem to call

Five styles of 'AI Product Development'

Me and lots of people I work or interact with are using AI to build things. The kind of things they are building vary a lot so I figured I would write down a few of the archetypes and some brief observations on each. Type 1 : A long running conversation

You can just do things.

"You can just do things" or some variation has been the unofficial slogan of startups for a long time. The expression was a reminder that you have permission. You are allowed to do things, nobody but you is stopping you trying something. The caveat that existed was that

Raising the floor, lowering the ceiling

I find that it is now very easy to write a lot of software. In the past, if I was writing this much software I would take that as a strong signal that I was become a better developer. Now, I write more software than ever but the link between