Eric Büttner

Software Engineer 💻 | 25+ yrs coding veteran 🔥 | DevOps by heart 💚 | passionate SEO hobbyist 📈 | Open-source advocate 🌍 | GitLab fanboy 🦊 | Gamer 🎮

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

Since I've been using a character counter quite a lot lately, I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to build one myself so I don't have to google it or search for it in my bookmarks all the time.

#buildinpublic

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@alexkadyrovcom That's fine

I just keep not using one on LinkedIn 🤣

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.

And he said it without being anti-AI.

Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.

Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.

The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.

And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.

Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.

The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.

What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.

Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.

Those are different jobs.

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@alexkadyrovcom 🤣

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@TimoBuilds_ I tried using AI, but it just didn't sound like me, so I had to tweak everything all over again

[Sebastian Heitmann @e2e_developer]

Prompting isn't the skill. Quality assurance is. The expert steers. The AI produces. Reverse that and you have a junior assistant running the company.

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@steuer This post was the reason to open and to immediately close it again 😅

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

Damn, I have a gravel bike, a fancy espresso machine and I (should) start training for the Berlin Marathon

[Kplx @kplx_art]

40 (Archive 2025)

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@e2e_developer My LinkedIn feed is full of AI slop 🫠

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@CityCoderUS Is it? 🤔

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@AtRealBen I had to do it twice 🥰

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@VideosAIpro @Kling_ai Wild!

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@thepmfguy @claudeai Accepting severance packages

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@david_nix If you’ve been following the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI over the last few days, this comes as no surprise

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@jeetasdev That was the idea behind it 😅

I think the current question is very clear: if you already have paying customers, then you have product-market fit and that’s what you should focus on.

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@marcs_dev People tend to give up from deleting their accounts, so high user numbers remain attractive to investors.

Keeping your contact details also means that there is a possibility to reactivate you as a paying customer.

I’m not saying this is positive, but that’s how business works.

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@marcs_dev I completely agree with you, but experience shows that it will probably make things worse and make it more difficult to delete accounts in order to reduce the churn rate.

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@pcshipp Even if it’s clickbait…

For the sake of completeness, the domain extension does not matter for SEO ✌️

[Eric Büttner @tuffzCOM]

@marcs_dev Definitely, but deleting the account is usually at the bottom of the priority list for each product manager.

In most cases, the goal is to reduce the churn rate, not to increase them. This makes it increasingly difficult to delete your account.