Elliot C Smith | Posts about Dev, Startups, and Product

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Elliot Smith

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

Quick thoughts on AI in Game Dev

Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on two different small games. Both are ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a while and now felt like a good time to work on them. One is an existing project written long before I

All the other bottlenecks

Writing code is fast now. Most teams are no longer blocked by the speed of turning specs into PRs. What I've noticed is that a lot of people, usually non-code-writing people, assumed that the speed of shipping the code was the only thing determining the speed

Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization

Introduction You don't need to look far to find claims that folks have been using AI to do the work of dozens of people. I tend to be skeptical of any claim that discusses improvements without evidence. I decided to take that skepticism and put it to work.