Sam VJ

Building AI-first tools ✦ Product ✦ Design ✦ Eng Previously @Apple, @YCombinator

[Sam VJ @samvj]

Vibe coding is raising the floor, agentic engineering is raising the ceiling.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@indiesoftwaredv @yantology Do you run meta ads? If so, do you limit them to reels / stories? And what kind of daily budget per ad set?

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@antinertia Growth

[Naval @naval]

Great Engineers are Also Artists.

“I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake, and done well, and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion.

And a lot of engineers are introverts.

As an aside, I hate the term “incel.” It’s just a way of putting introverts down. It’s the new “nerd,” if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I’m more likely to want to interview them. So let’s move away from the slurs.

But introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They’re going to express themselves through their craft. They’re going to create art.

In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they’ve done on the side. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, water bottles. There’s one who’s done incredible music videos, really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products, much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying, “This is going to replace me.” Whereas someone who doesn’t have that identity of an artist and doesn’t feel threatened by it—it’s just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create.

Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They’re capable of anything. It’s just they’ve chosen to be engineers and focused on building things because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful.”

[Sam VJ @samvj]

In theory everything works.

In practice barely anything works.

Being a great operator is knowing the difference.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

The bar has never been higher and lower at the same time.

Higher to cut through the noise.

Lower to deliver on quality.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

My concerns for attrition in software engineering keeps dropping.

Making AI software and dealing with non-deterministic outputs is 10-100x harder than “classic” software.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

You can now use Claude Sonnet 4 directly in Xcode! 👏

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@JulianGarnier Great work! Been waiting for this to drop 🔥

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@brunostasse Great work!

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@blakeandersonw Congrats on getting this out. It looks really good!

One question: what model are you using? And feedback: using a better one would be helpful so people aren’t lead astray.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

Sometimes, to move forward, you have to take a step back.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@bekacru This is low key one of the best dot releases of any project. Keep up the great work!

[Sam VJ @samvj]

Instead of starting with an idea, start with a moat:
1. Distribution
2. Data
3. Brand

If you don’t have one of those, partner.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@Dsandoval20112 @yuris You got it. Here’s the full answer: https://t.co/1iL0c7sMTa

[Sam VJ @samvj]

Claude 3.7 Sonnet delivers.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@karrisaarinen Most products are optimized for market efficiency. It takes an unreasonable amount of effort and care to create quality products.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@LucaNetz This is unequivocally true for the app layer.

At the same time, there is a massive opportunity space in the infra layer for agents that your app can hire to service specialized functions.

It’s easy to write off infra as commodity, but then you get game changers like @vercel.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@rauchg 100%

https://t.co/XdLx3Tqklz

[Sam VJ @samvj]

Markdown is the new RSS. And thanks to LLMs, it’s supported by the entire web.

[Sam VJ @samvj]

@illyism 📠