Claude is genuinely impressive, but it doesn t remove the need to understand programming fundamentals. You still need to know how systems connect, where data lives, how state is managed, what environments are (dev vs staging vs production), how deployments work, and how things actually run (& fail) in the real world.

For developers, Claude is an incredible accelerator. For non-programmers, it can feel magical at first, but at some point, real engineering knowledge becomes unavoidable.

All of us want customers on our platforms. However, a sign-up is very different from an engaged user who keeps returning and finding value over time.

Creating the right user experience, without being too intrusive, spammy, or in your face , can significantly improve engagement, increase conversions, and reduce churn. In my experience, a platform s success is defined far more by its active users than by the total number of people who have ever signed up.

Below are a few approaches I ve seen work well, along with some that haven t been as effective.

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools: