Elliot C Smith

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Latest — 28 Mar 2026

Some thoughts after shipping a project 95% written by Claude

I ran this as an experiment. It was a side project I was probably never going to get around to building. I wanted to test the most extreme version of "Let Claude Do the Work" and see where it got to. I avoided plugins and just ran the

More issues

Product Teams vs Feature Teams in an AI world.

All the way back in 2019, Marty Cagan wrote an article titled "Product vs Feature Teams". If you're building things you should read it in full but right now I want to take a look at how these ideas land as more and more teams are

Build SaaS with Strong Opinions

The SaaS product of the future is there to force you into best practice, not to let you configure your way there.

What do AI based layoffs say about their ability to scale?

If AI makes you twice as efficient, shouldn't you do twice as much with your current resources?

Are they software companies or do they just have software problems?

Many of today's software companies just happen to use software as a distribution mechanism. Others are purely software. Knowing the difference is critical to assessing the long term impacts of AI.

Findings, Feb 2026

Products, Games, Books and Links Books I finished Harrow the Ninth, book two of locked tomb. I'm enjoying the series so far, especially as the world building expands. A large part of this book was written in the second person which took some getting used to. It relates

Reflection on revamping our sales process

Over the last month or so I've been working on updating our sales process. The trigger for this was merging two different sales teams into a single unified team. In this merge I went over our process, our CRM setup and how we were measuring success. Some of

The unbound potential of open tabs

I often go through a loop of visiting sites like hacker news or lobste.rs, opening half a dozen tabs in the background based on their name and then waiting days to read them. They sit in my list of open tabs and trigger a mild pang of guilt when

Findings, Jan 2026

💡Bringing back something I tried a while ago. A once a month round up of little things too small for their own post. Products, Games, Books and Music pynb — Python Notebooks Without the FussPython notebooks without the fuss. Fast, local notebooks for data science and machine learning. Privacy-first.pynb This

How to, mostly, guarantee success in your career

Over my career so far I have done a lot of different things. I've written code, designed PCBs and MRI machines, run Google ads, been out on the road doing sales and managed teams doing all of the above. Overall, regardless of the job at hand, I think