This week at Jots
Hi community!

Firstly, we want to wish you a Happy New Year!

Guys,
I'm looking for some knowledge workers to get involved in helping to shape Clarity!
If anyone is interested, let me know in the comments!

Most code doesn t last.
But the reasoning behind it should.

Good code review captures intent,
why something exists,
what problem it was meant to solve,
and what tradeoffs were accepted at the time.

I wrote a long essay following a talk I gave at AI DevCon in Brooklyn last month.

It starts out with an anecdote about hunting ChatGPT in December 2022 and goes on to explore what I think will be necessary to thrive as code becomes a commodity:

In December 2022, I hunted ChatGPT on Product Hunt.

It ranked #1 product of the day, then the week, and went on to be named Product of the Year.

Having co-founded a YC-backed conversational AI startup in 2018 (long before LLMs) I recognized in ChatGPT the missing ingredient that would have made that venture viable.

The future we d anticipated had arrived. I could revisit my old problem, or I could expand my area of potency by raising and deploying my own venture capital fund.

I chose the latter.

Three years later, on December 9th, I watched a 24-hour window on Product Hunt cross 500 launches roughly double what I observed throughout the preceding 825 days. Only 13 were featured; most were unremarkable.

The LLM has fundamentally shifted the economics of software development.

As someone with a dual vantage point being the #1 Product Hunter while investing in AI startups I watch the floodwaters rise in real-time.

What s become clear: SaaS is dying; VC is withering . Building software is not uniquely compelling. Code has become a commodity.

What most people miss about commoditization is that when a product or resource becomes abundant, it doesn t just get cheaper. It unlocks new and previously uneconomic uses.

I'm 9 months in, broke, and zero paying users. I built Linko to fix the "conversion deficit" in Linktree, but I'm questioning everything.

Hey everyone,

I m reaching out here because I m hitting the wall and need some brutally honest feedback from people who have been through the same quiet phase.

I m a software developer who spent 9 months and too much of my own savings building a professional link-in-bio tool I call Linko. I honestly believe it solves a critical, expensive problem for agencies and serious marketers, but here I am months after the basic version was ready, with zero paying customers and almost no subscriptions. I feel completely discouraged because I ve invested so much time and money, and I haven t made a dime on it.

We'll discuss building no-code Nano Banana agents that can actually generate on-brand designs for your company.

YouTube thumbnails. Ad creatives. Social media graphics. Blog post covers. You name it!

I m building a platform called AnalyzeWare. It automates a bunch of strategy analysis frameworks like SWOT, PEST, competitor analysis, financial ratios, TRL, ESG and more.

The idea is simple: turn hours of report work into a few minutes.

Consultants can white-label the reports and manage clients inside the platform.

Thanks to the Custom Session Context feature we released last week...

ICYMI, it's a way for your website to "brief" your AI before it talks to your users - more here: https://youtu.be/kcxQc4xYYYM

Founders kept telling me the same thing:

I send demo videos but I have no idea what happens after.

So we fixed it.

There s still a lot of attention on flashy categories: AI agents, creator tools, social apps. At the same time, you keep hearing quiet stories about people building solid, calm businesses around very unsexy problems: invoicing for a niche industry, compliance workflows, scheduling in weird contexts, back-office tools nobody outside the niche has heard of.

I m curious whether your view of what s worth building has changed over the last few years. Would you be excited to build something deeply boring if the demand and willingness to pay were obvious? Or do you still feel pulled towards more visible, consumer-facing or hyped spaces? And for those already in boring niches, how has that choice played out in terms of users, stress and revenue?