Nat Guy

B2b buyer & customer journeys at Pathdraft. Continuous #CX improvement via rapid sprints at Sunny. Musician. Petter of dogs.

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@lennysan Interesting.

- Start own company #2
- Lots of B2B
- Previous B2C faang darlings like Meta, Apple didn’t make the list

[Nat Guy @natguy]

Interesting. At least for Lenny’s audience on X/LinkedIn:

- Start their own company #2 spot
- Lots of B2B
- Previous B2C faang darlings like Meta, Apple not on the list.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Fascinating results

+ Anthropic running away with it right now
+ So many people want to start their own company
+ Google over OpenAI
+ Vercel, Linear, Every, PostHog overperforming

A great list if you're trying to figure out where to go work 👇

[Nat Guy @natguy]

Why Microsoft blocked Databricks’ integration:

Battle for yer biz’s semantic layer.

(Layer that gives agents accurate “when we say ‘revenue’ we mean this…” context they need to a) understand yr biz so that b) they can act.)

Part of the great “de-silo’ing of team-speak data”

[Kevin McLaughlin @KevKubernetes]

Microsoft recently made a decision that highlights the looming battle over the "semantic layer," a data management tool that could make AI agents more accurate & cheaper to run. Databricks, Snowflake & others are also in the mix. More here: https://t.co/uxI9xPX8ju

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@shadcn 🤘

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano And AI needs state 😀

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@shadcn The only way AIs replace UIs is if we go full Skynet and humans (the “u” in UI) no longer interface (the “i”) with AI in anyway

The only way AIs replace APIs is if capitalism dies & there’re no systems to integrate together

1 single AI controlled by 1 org

Ha. Let’s hope not

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@shadcn The only way AIs replace UIs is if we go full Skynet and humans (the “u” in UI) no longer interface (the “i”) with AI in anyway

The only way AIs replace APIs is if capitalism dies & there’re no systems to integrate together

1 single AI controlled by 1 org

Ha. Let’s hope not

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@mattpocockuk @GilGuminski To watch for: conflation (when same word mean dif things) & muddying the ontology soup (dif words mean same thing)

Can be a goal: terms mean same thing across tools

Atomic unit of work:
Task?
Issue?
Ticket?

“Hey indstry can we agree on 1 word like commit, pr…!” ha

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@mattpocockuk Fer fun declarative @XStateJS vers. ha

createMachine({
id:'dev',
states:{
plan:{
on:{
ADD_TASK:{…},
START:'do'
}
},
do:{
on:{
TASK_DONE:{…},
DONE:'commit'
}
},
commit:{on:{NEXT:'pr'}},
pr:{}…

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@mattpocockuk Ontology of dev state

Intent:
- “Project” (group of plans; epic)
- “Plan” (grp of Tasks; spec, PRD, sprint)
- “Task” (unit o work; issue, ticket)

Execution:
- Branch (grp o Commits)
- Commit (atomic change; revision)

Completion:
- PR (grp of Commits)
- Merge
- Deploy (release)

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@mattpocockuk And more: another layer up in intent:

- “Initiative” (group of Projects; program, theme)

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@lennysan @gokulr Now: “we can build anything?!” fever (rightfully so). Every biz in Churn Out Mode

Features as differentiation. Feat. speed as GTM. “Look what we ship’d!”

But not dif. if every1 churn out same stuff

Eventually: designers or whoevr: opinionated alt-UX taste cuts thru, revalued

[Nat Guy @natguy]

?

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.

The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models.

Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano Ha. Likely said as another OS drop scrambles folks’ brains

Like saying “Customer problems r solved”

As long as there’re new problems, there’ll be folks chiseling away at new UX, new workflows, stacking new primitives in new ways to make it better

That is until capitalism dies

[Nat Guy @natguy]

Xstate v5 skill:

[David K 🎹 @DavidKPiano]

Released the XState v5 skill 🚀

The goal isn't just "know the API" but rather "help agents make really good state machines"

Tuned & tested against real examples, common anti-patterns, and the mistakes* LLMs tend to make with XState

npx skills add statelyai/skills

[Nat Guy @natguy]

Ya’ll liking this trend of hiding away file directory like new Claude Code, Codex, Cursor etc via multi-agent UXes?

That + abstracting planning further from user: 2 things I’m not loving

A. See structure = 1 way to understand app as evolves

B. Easy access to plans to tweak

[Nat Guy @natguy]

Yer component library should separate:

- style
from
- behavior/state primitives

Example:

Shadcn as style & composition layer that can swap in/out Radix or Base UI’s stateful primitives.

Without rewriting everything.

(Alt to “bake it all into 1 npm package” like MaterialUI)

[shadcn @shadcn]

The fact that you can update a shadcn/ui app created in 2023 from Radix to Base UI is proof that the model works.

I think, hear me out, that installing a component library that bundles styles with primitives into npm packages is a liability at this point. You're undoing the whole point of headless libraries.

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano Yeah, has the Page already become old school, on its death bed? Ha.

The SaaS-y, first the list -> then the detail page is just too many steps? Too slow?

The one pager expectations already taking over: do all the things in one view, right now?

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano Yeah like for big backend requests or how human designers approach: seems to help a bit to guide w/ scoped chunks:

- reusable ui components over time
- separate “brand elements” of themes: colors, fonts, radius amount etc
- nanny its use of chosen ui libraries like shadcn or alt

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano Tho am just diving into x-state + thread/msg management + output artifact + scheduling etc things and digging it very much.

Will report... :)

[Nat Guy @natguy]

@DavidKPiano Nice 👍

Are yer threads & msgs stored as full + tiny summaries?

A “Convo Focus Manager” compaction-alt:

1 Give agent a manifest of msgs w state: SUMMARY or FULL

2 Agent reasons on current convo, flips msgs SUMMARY ↔ FULL

3 System rebuilds prompt from manifest each turn