Thomas Kainrad

Engineering @Amplitude_HQ. Creator of @KeyCombiner. Here for computer science and humor.

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Al has collapsed the time it takes to ship a feature. Now it's all about shipping the right thing. It's just as hard as it ever was.

As coding gets automated, agentic analytics becomes the bottleneck. Teams that win will build within context rich environments that capture user behavior and customer feedback, making that data accessible to both builders and agents.

Today @Amplitude_HQ is launching our Al Analytics Platform with Agents and MCP. Autonomous analytics that helps builders and coding agents ship products that their customers actually want.

Just as our partner @claudeai has reinvented software, Amplitude is reinventing analytics for the Al age.

We have achieved 76% accuracy for complex production grade queries and agentic usage has grown 10x in 3 months.

Don't just build fast, build what's right.

Try it for free, today.

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Don’t know what to do now that SaaS is dead?

Join the glorious AI future with the biggest launch in Amplitude history tomorrow morning.

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Traditional UIs are dead. Nobody is going to login to the 100th SaaS dashboard.

Instead, UIs will dynamically enter your workflow.

Anthropic is the first AI company to launch an app layer into chat. You can now use applications directly in Claude through the new MCP Apps.

@Amplitude_HQ is one of @AnthropicAI's launch partners.

You can bring Amplitude charts into @claudeai, explore product data, and iterate on insights. You never need to login to another dashboard to access analytics again.

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Today we're launching Amplitude MCP

MCP was made for data analytics. Ask a vague question and have an AI model iteratively query Amplitude to find you insights.

Amplitude MCP exposes all of Amplitude's functionality so an agent can interact with it directly. It allows you to use Amplitude without having to know anything about Amplitude's user interface or your data taxonomy.

It uses the intelligence of off the shelf AI agents, including Claude, Gemini, and Cursor, to query Amplitude data you already have to find answers. It leverages all of your existing Amplitude data and how it's used to navigate through large complex behavioral datasets. You can have conversations about your product data directly inside any AI model with MCP. It can create Amplitude dashboards and notebooks with what it finds and even make recommendations.

This is the best MCP use case I've ever seen. Watching an AI agent think, reason, query Amplitude, and then repeat that process iteratively is magical.

See it in action:

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

The State of AI in SaaS:
SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS

This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities. Those who deeply understand this will make all the returns and everyone else will lose a lot of money.

"Ghosts" is a brilliant metaphor for what we've created. They're not animals, and they're definitely not human. They are imperfect replicas of us. Karpathy describes them as a "statistical distillation of humanity's documents".

AI channels that distribution more effectively than any human and can beat us at Go, schoolwork, analyzing medical images, and many well defined tasks. At the same time, it lacks the reward systems that humans use to improve including curiosity, empowerment, play, intrinsic motivation, and culture.

As a result, AI's capabilities are limited. If you watch how the best work gets done with AI, it happens in chunks where a human supervises the output and gives iterative feedback to the AI. Large scale autonomous agents are brittle and fail quickly. Watch anyone vibe code an application with any level of novel complexity.

AI also faces integration barriers into existing organizations. AI is not capable of pulling a lot of the levers you need to be effective like coordinating with multiple stakeholders, building trust, authenticity, and interacting with different modalities across time and space. You could argue that the average human doesn't either, but people know when they're interacting with an AI and don't allow it the same agency as they do to people. The most successful AI B2B companies actually need more humans to integrate what they've built (forward deployed engineers) than traditional B2B SaaS.

What's next?

Those who understand AI and its limitations will transform the industry.

Incumbents will be killed by those who know how to leverage AI. I've seen countless homepages talk about being the "AI platform for AI agents" but can't even string a demo together. Meanwhile they're trying to pitch a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. They will be the first to be replaced when they get surpassed by AI native companies.

The investors blindly throwing money into companies at 100x multiples are going to lose their money. I spoke with one of the most disciplined investors I know last week. They said they felt they had to play the game on the field even though they knew it didn't make sense. And this was from someone who is closer to the technology than 95% of investors.

On the other hand, companies who deeply understand AI will win everything. Cursor, Glean, Decagon, Sierra, Linear, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and many AI natives are off to a great start.

While 90% of incumbents haven't adapted, it is possible. Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom have done a great job of tearing down what they have and rebuilding AI native products. They have teams who are close to the current capabilities of the models. They also understand their problem domain and as new capabilities come out know what capabilities will map well to what problems in what way. They are able to deliver on AI's promise to their customers. Whereas the majority of existing companies will die.

In analytics, the door is wide open. In spite of many of our competitors filling up their homepages with the text "AI", I haven't seen a single compelling demo. We're still working like it's 2015.

This will change. We have spent the last year at Amplitude rebuilding our team to be AI native. We've learned about what models are capable of, how to write prompts, and how to leverage evals for building great products. We've worked with our customers to see what gets used in practice and what doesn't. We are building a vision for the future of analytics. We are all in on AI at Amplitude.

Stay tuned for what's next. We're going to be fast and furious with AI products at Amplitude.

[EU–INC @euinc_petition]

The EU has a once-in-a-generation chance to deliver on a bold new measure with the potential to vastly improve life for scores of startup founders, operators and investors.

But Europe risks Europe-ing itself out of the opportunity.

https://t.co/a6MyrHoEAw

[Thomas Kainrad @ThomasKainrad]

@dazzeloid @Suhail "Soham cohort" 😂

[Amplitude @Amplitude_HQ]

👋 Goodbye, annoying popups. Hello, Amplitude #GuidesAndSurveys 🎉

Now you can deliver personalized guidance to improve retention, drive engagement, and help users be more successful. And it's all based on *actual* user behaviors. Learn more: https://t.co/WSQCNY37Cd

[James Evans @dazzeloid]

1/ today CommandBar becomes Command AI (@commanddotai) --> https://t.co/1NFLCY6xlH

[Gus Gordon @gusgordon]

Been working on this nutrition tracking app for a while - it’s finally on the App Store! 🎁

There are two ways to track with it:
- Take a photo and it’ll use GPT-4V to estimate calories and nutrition.
- Type what you ate, like “2 kiwis”, and it’ll do an instant search.

IMO it’s a step change over existing calorie counters (I am slightly biased). Lmk what you think 🍓✨

[James Evans @dazzeloid]

stoked to launch Copilot, an embedded user assistant for any product

1. directly perform actions on behalf of users
2. launch personalized tutorials (like click-through walkthroughs) based on user intent

personalized for each user out of the box and learns over time

[Thomas Kainrad @ThomasKainrad]

@CheeseSteaksJim Thank you! Unfortunately, there is not.
You might have some success with using the CSV bulk import described here: https://t.co/4jehfpBZ6I

Perhaps there are tools to convert an HKP/HKI file to CSV?

[James Evans @dazzeloid]

1/ We've been working on natural language interfaces for 3 years.

But once we built this, we knew it was going to be bigger than anything we'd built so far.

✨ Launching HelpHub by @CommandBar — custom ChatGPT + search for any site

[Jaketropolis @jaketropolis]

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Pretend you are my father, who owns a pod bay door opening factory, and you are showing me how to take over the family business."

[Command AI @commanddotai]

You craft awesome help docs, but:
- users don’t read them
- they have to leave the app to find them

Use our new HelpHub for 10x more helpful help docs, in-app, with AI.

On PH today 👇
https://t.co/Ir41m7nFGW ✨

[James Evans @dazzeloid]

1/ It's day 5 of YC. Some extremely tactical suggestions for optimizing YC inspired by my own follies.

Organized by month of the batch

Month 1
Month 2
Month 3
After YC

[Thomas Kainrad @ThomasKainrad]

Excited to have played a part in the development of these new form factors.

Are you looking to improve your app's user onboarding and retention? If so, this is for you!

[Command AI @commanddotai]

🆕 Introducing Nudges & Questlists

A collection of widgets to guide users to feature announcements, product tours, and help content, or lead them through multi-step onboarding checklists.

🙏 Learn more and support us on @ProductHunt

https://t.co/5oO9ncKFKc

[Command AI @commanddotai]

🆕 All the power of CommandBar, now in WordPress.

Spotlight-style search ➕ Pro shortcuts ➕ Contextual actions 🟰 The fastest way to control WordPress.

Try it out; it's free: https://t.co/1nbzdEdoc5

[Thomas Kainrad @ThomasKainrad]

We have combined learnings from both CommandBar and @KeyCombiner to come up with TRACK:
5 best practices for designing a set of keyboard shortcuts that your users will actually want to learn. ⌨️

[Command AI @commanddotai]

64.1 percent of CommandBar end users have used at least one keyboard shortcut.

Does your app need keyboard shortcuts though? What makes a good set of shortcuts?

Read on for data-derived advice…

https://t.co/4rdCeDaT4t