Jake Simons

AI Product @billcom | #Prodmgmt #RSL #MUFC

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @danshipper:

1. The future of work will happen inside Codex or Claude Code. Instead of putting AI into your SaaS tool, you’ll use your SaaS tools inside your favorite AI agents' in-app browser. Dan spends all his time in Codex now—writing documents, managing email, doing research, everything. He's using Google Docs, PostHog, and everything he needs within the agent's in-app browser. The agent can see what he’s doing, and has all of his context, so he and his agent collaborate quickly and super effectively.

2. Automation is a lie—every automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward. Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working. This is why benchmarks are misleading—they measure AI on problems we’ve already framed and can score, but there’s always a higher frame.

3. PMs will win the AI era. Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axios’s writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled. Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team. He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters. Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for you—what matters is figuring out what to build and if it’s great.

4. Full-stack designers are becoming superheroes. Designers used to make beautiful interactions that engineers didn’t want to build or couldn’t execute properly. Now designers don’t need to hand things off; they can build it themselves. Designers are naturally creative people, and AI is the perfect tool for them because it lets them bring their vision to life without the traditional bottlenecks.

5. SaaS is not dead. In fact, Dan is bullish on SaaS stocks. When users bring their own AI (via Codex or Claude Code) to use SaaS products, the user—not the SaaS company—pays for tokens. This saves SaaS company’s margins. Since the agents need their own seats, Dan predicts that agents will create massive new demand for SaaS because there will be tons of agents using these products at high volume.

6. Every company will have one “super-agent” inside their Slack that every employee will use. Dan initially thought every employee would have their personal work agent, like a shadow AI org chart, but he’s completely flipped his view. He realized agents need humans who care about them. When someone gets tired of maintaining their personal agent, it becomes useless. The winning model is one forward-deployed engineer or AI-savvy person who maintains a company-wide agent (like Shopify’s River or Viktor), and then it trickles down to more specialized team agents as models improve and become less fiddly.

7. The AI job apocalypse is not happening, but you do need to evolve to stay relevant. Models make yesterday’s human competence cheap. But because everyone uses the same models, it all looks the same if you use it the default way; it becomes commoditized slop. Humans then take that frozen competence and use it to make something new and interesting for their specific situation. The key: “ride the models”—use them for everything you do, try new models when they drop, keep turning over rocks.

8. We will read way more AI-generated writing, and we will like it. Human writing is incredibly important for things that matter, but for internal docs, planning, and email, AI-generated is often better because most people are bad at writing strategy documents.

9. Build software for humans and agents to use together. The current model is building a CLI that an agent uses independently. Instead, you and your agent should be using the app together. This creates new design challenges—agents can make a billion requests in three seconds, so you need approval flows, inboxes that summarize what happened, logs, and easy rollback.

10. Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role. The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams aren’t going away. It’s different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it. As models get better, this role will evolve—you’ll be managing more agents doing more things.

[Bracco | Social Sportsbook @PlayBracco]

“How your week going?”

My week:
https://t.co/sSA5Mmwj26

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Knowing what to build, for who, and how to get them to use it is actually harder

[Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke]

Running a company:

2020: can you survive a pandemic?

2021: still here? we’re going to give all of your competitors $100m series A rounds.

2022: wow, you made it? okay, all engineers cost $600,000/year now.

2023: nice job! okay, SVB failed and we’re going to take away your bank account.

2024: a survivor I see. but can you pivot from ai to crypto to defense tech back to ai-enabled defense tech in a 12 month period to stay relevant?

2025: unfortunately all of your competitors have raised $2b series B rounds. oh and only 500 engineers are relevant and they cost $100m/yr each.

2026: well, well, well. you’re still in business? let’s deploy the thunderclap of godlike LLMs from the heavens so all of your customers can rebuild your app in 2 hours. can you survive?

[Real Salt Lake @realsaltlake]

Presser is live 👇

https://t.co/sjWA8bnZCV

[Adam Rackis @AdamRackis]

When your drug dealer complains you’re not doing enough drugs

[Nathan Baschez @nbaschez]

AI pretty much obliterates the way tech companies organize teams to build products

What teams have figured out the new way?

We got the agile manifesto 25 years ago, who is writing this for the AI era?

[kyle @Kylypso]

One of the most important things to me is the #RSL community. It’s a community built on love, solidarity, & passion for something we care deeply about. And we care deeply about each other.

We lost a member of the community this week. Help out if you can: https://t.co/YTIB8IoUn9

[Caitlin Kalinowski @kalinowski007]

I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.

[Tomasz Łakomy @tlakomy]

Reviewing Claude Code output before pushing directly to prod

[Jeff Mac @Mac_The_Jazz]

I’m seriously floored by this.

People are demanding more decorum and better manners out of a couple skiers THAN THE PRESIDENT.

[Andrew Justin @COSportsNut]

People out here worried about how American athletes represent America but not worried about how the President represents America

Make it make sense

[Jake Simons @bjakesimons]

@Kylypso @iLikeAza @realsaltlake In this economy?!

[Jake Simons @bjakesimons]

@Kylypso @iLikeAza @realsaltlake This was hilarious. Thanks both.

[Melkey @MelkeyDev]

"So you gave your ai agent full permission to all your personal information and connected it to a social media network with other ai agents?

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

No, it's fine, I like the AI takeover, I just didn't think it'd be so lobster-themed

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Our highest loyalty doesn’t belong to people or parties. It belongs to principles.

If you wouldn’t accept it from the “other side,” you shouldn’t accept it from yours.

Integrity is upholding your values even when your own group violates them.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Pam Bondi just sent a letter to Minnesota officials saying ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database to Trump.

Guess what? This has never been about safety or immigration. It’s a pretext for Trump to take over elections in swing states.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Claiming to follow Jesus who was unjustly accused, arrested, and executed by the state, all with religious justification, and then passionately supporting the state without question as it aggressively goes after people has to be one of the most blatant contradictions in history.