Dylan

Ex e-commerce founder turned AI builder 🤖 Running 5 live products with AI agents. Sharing workflows, honest numbers & mistakes. Building from 🇨🇳

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

2020: my e-commerce business made 8 figures (RMB) in annual profit.
2023: I lost a big chunk of it in crypto.
Today: I run 5 live products, built mostly by me + AI agents.
I couldn’t write a single line of code until 2024 🧵

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

A busy terminal is the new busy inbox 😅

[Thariq @trq212]

There’s 100% a kind of mania you can get into with coding agents, where it feels like you’re getting a lot done and working all the time but nothing is really happening.

I think it's often a form of avoidance of something else in life.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@aitordri Same thing in a one person setup. With 4 agents running, code shows up faster than I can read it, so review is my bottleneck too.

Did the policy say anything about patch size?

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@TokenGremlin I'm on the $200 Codex plan. If chat and agents share one quota, I'd at least want to see which one is burning it.

Any word on whether the doubled Pro limits survive the merge?

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@MTSlive @antoniogm Ecommerce went from "you need a store" to "you need a store for bots". A homepage that says "humans not welcome" is coming.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

Fake ARR is just fake GMV with a SaaS haircut.

Ecommerce went through this years ago. Big gross numbers, then refunds, returns and discounts ate half of it.

The only revenue I trust now is what's left after the refund window closes.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@finnbuilt Almost a third of the way. Heads up, I read replies don't count toward the 500K, only your own posts.

Which posts pulled most of your 144K?

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@OliverBugar Same lesson from ecommerce. Opening the store was never the hard part, the first orders from strangers were.

What got you your first 10?

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@gregisenberg Ecommerce had the same thing with GMV. Big gross numbers that never survived refunds, returns and discounts.Same trick, nicer font.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@arvidkahl It knows my whole codebase but not its own fuel gauge 😅

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@keelenai Exactly where I landed.

Project files: go wild.
Anything that can cut the connection: wait for me.

Lesson cost me one client deadline.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

Client delivery due at 8pm. One small step left.

Left at 6, so I had Codex on my Mac finish it from my phone.

It asked to update my VPN. "Only a few seconds offline." I said yes.

Config broke. Mac offline till morning.

Never let your agent touch the network it runs on.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@tomykite Adding features is fun. Watching yourself get lost in your own app is humbling 😅

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@GergelyOrosz The new networking question: "how many agents do you have running right now?"

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@markessien Worktrees are just a fancy way of saying "I refuse to watch a progress bar" 😅

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@Rajatwtall Vinay, happy to help, and no need to pay.

I can't do weeks of calls, but DM me what you've built so far and what you're good at. I'll send you one concrete next step.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@Kedeodev Spent it on ads, a new laptop and a team offsite. All in my head, all before lunch 😭

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@patrick_kuhnke_ Fair. A working app and paying customers are two separate bets, and most people only plan for the first one.

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@iniyanai Wait until you tell them your coworkers are AI agents 😅

[Dylan @CyyDylan]

@codexresets_ My $200 Codex plan is about to become a $200 half plan 😅