Rowan

Ex-VP Engineering. 13 years scaling systems and teams for unicorns. Now building Opinions on tech, markets, and table tennis.

[Rowan @therook_]

1/ I have 13 years of programming experience. AI can now do most of it. Here's what that means and why I quit my job anyway. 🧵

[Rowan @therook_]

@brunoqgalvao @TheRohanVarma You can use https://t.co/ZUyCcEfmcd for any other ide

[Rowan @therook_]

@noauthflow @antinertia infra is the floor. scalability is the architecture the scaffold enforces + real code written by SOTA agents you can actually profile and fix, not a black box. three different arguments in 20 mins is a lot of conviction for someone who hasn't opened the product. good chat.

[Rowan @therook_]

@ayyysh22 for sure, try it out (it's free for your first app), let me know if you get stuck anywhere, only caveat for your particular use-case is you'll have to start the project again using mistflow, but you might find that it builds it better in terms of design and stack.

[Rowan @therook_]

agree to disagree brother, you won't know until you try; the scalability is baked in with the design decisions, edge compute, postgres db, secured auth, pre-vetted stack and scaffold, and worthwhile is just the lack of imagination.

on business model, there are ample people and enough TAM for people spending hundreds of dollars per week on loveable.

[Rowan @therook_]

@noauthflow @antinertia sure, but the outcome dosen't have to be shitty or scrapy, if you put proper guardrails in place you can vibe code a serious well designed and engineered software.

[Rowan @therook_]

mistflow does, since all the code for your app is written by claude code (opus 4.8) or codex (gpt 5.5) and code is created/compiled on your own laptop, it definitely works on real projects, it just provides you db, auth, file storage, backend hosting, frontend hosting, and ai gateway, you can make something big/small/complex/simple with mistflow like any coding project.

[Rowan @therook_]

@antinertia please give Mistflow a shot; you'll be pleasantly surprised.

[Rowan @therook_]

regulations prevent you from opening Delaware llc too without having an entity in india, please read up on FEMA and ODI rules, it's not straightforward now

best way is to open a LLC or OPC, which is less than 50$ per month of expenses and easy to do + use razorpay or dodopayments

[Rowan @therook_]

I have huge respect for Anthropic, but for a company having so many CTO's as MTS, it should be a bit more stable

[Rowan @therook_]

@wam_ai_tech sometimes 52 years is also not enough to understand the basics.

[Rowan @therook_]

@Mugilan_SS @OpenAI token anxiety on claude code is basically EV range anxiety. i keep checking usage like the battery icon

[Rowan @therook_]

@theo I feel the same, their voice model is on par with elevenlabs, and at 1/3rd the cost, i've shifted all workloads to it already.

[Rowan @therook_]

@Mugilan_SS @OpenAI token anxiety on claude code is basically EV range anxiety. i keep checking usage like the battery icon

[Rowan @therook_]

@BaluGorade it won't be a 2.4 lakh crore company if he owned 50%, you need to burn cash for that kind of growth.

[Rowan @therook_]

@levelsio I've heard that the nature is amazing; don't care about tech stuff at all, there is enough of that on the internet.

[Rowan @therook_]

@Clara_Gold I've heard that the nature is amazing; don't care about tech stuff at all, there is enough of that on the internet.

[Rowan @therook_]

@mitchellh github has completely disappeared to me as well, since it's mostly claude code/codex interacting with it, i wouldn't matter much if there is github or any other provider behind managing git, since getting used to ui is no longer required.

[Rowan @therook_]

@paulg Didn't Anthropic ship a legal plugin in Feb that already has this sector in turn-moil, they also signed Harvey, Lexis, Intapp, Freshfields. Every partner is replaceable. Margins are going to be compressed, i don't believe workflows are moat.

[Rowan @therook_]

This aligns with what think of health-trackers, they are a net negative for some people and makes them anxious, i use my apple watch just as an accessory and never look at the data, just go by how you are feeling, if you are tired, rest, you don't need to keep looking at sleep score and HRV, maybe once a few months.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

You check your Apple Watch in the morning. Sleep score: 62. You decide it's going to be a foggy day. And then it is.

A 2014 Colorado College study suggests the score itself causes the fog.

164 people walked into a lab. Researchers hooked them up to fake EEG equipment and told them the readout would show their REM percentage from the night before. Then they fabricated a number. Half the room was told 28.7%. Half was told 16.2%. The machine wasn't measuring anything.

Participants took four cognitive tests. The Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test, where you add numbers spoken at increasing speed and hold your last sum in working memory while computing the next. And the Controlled Oral Word Association Task, where you generate as many words as you can starting with a single letter under time pressure. Both are gold-standard measures of attention and executive function used in clinical neurology.

The 28.7% group outperformed the 16.2% group on both. Significantly. How rested participants actually felt that morning predicted nothing.

The mechanism is mindset priming an executive resource. When you believe you slept well, you allocate cognitive effort more aggressively. You don't conserve. You don't pre-disengage. Belief about the resource changes how you spend it.

Two control conditions ruled out demand characteristics. Participants weren't trying harder because they thought they should. Real measurable cognitive performance shifted with the number on the readout.

The Apple Watch sleep score. The Oura ring readiness number. The morning ritual of checking either one is taxing the resource you're about to need.

The performance gap from a fabricated REM percentage was larger than the gap from how rested participants actually felt. The number was louder than the night.