Patrik
Wise words of the week
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. — Louis L’Amour
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation. — Albert Einstein (often attributed)
Journal
This is the 15th issue of this journal. I’m quite happy about it and the feedback I heard was mostly positive. When we started, it was a leap in the dark. Yes, at work I did regularly write technical documents like design docs. But writing a blog is a different matter. Time to look back.
We had one of our in-person meetings on April 1st (no kidding!). One of the topics was about creating documentation for the website. Just that it’s hard to start from scratch. And slightly easier to start writing a blog and then distill some of the information into a separate knowledge-base. Also, Marc has this idea of writing a founder’s journal to tell our experience bootstrapping the company. I liked the idea despite being a newbie in this area, I never had a real blog before and I’m painfully aware that it can look stale really quickly if there’s no regular content added. I was also worried about running out of ideas after the third article.
We discussed the how, just keep it simple: use 30 minutes during our weekly meeting to write down what is top of our mind related to the business. And on top of it, talk about ‘how did I use AI’ in the past week to have something in common. No preparation otherwise. Usually in the meeting, once we are done with the administrative stuff, comes the ‘shall we write the journal now’ and ‘see you in 30 minutes’. Then we just start. No thinking, just spontaneous writing. Once done, we share the articles and read them.
And here happens the interesting thing: we often talk about the same topics. It almost sounds like we prepared and agreed on the topic, but actually there is no preparation nor agreement at all before we start writing.
How did I use AI this week?
In the last months, I’ve noticed a significant jump in the quality of Cursor’s results. Last year, there were probably 20% of the requests that ended up causing issues. Now, Cursor seems to really get what I’m asking and also seems much better at understanding the code base. Also, the speed seems to have increased quite a bit.
In the last weeks, I was mostly working from the laptop. This means a much smaller screen and lots of painful back and forth when writing features that are scattered across a dozen files. So I started leaning more and more on the AI to help me there. I started asking the AI to explain to me my own code (yeah, I know that sounds weird) and help me when I didn’t see where the issue was.
As much as I like writing code, there are parts of the code base I don’t really like to touch. And there are times when I just don’t feel like coding. So I started delegating more and more of the coding to the AI. And it actually worked.
Marc
The build
The main learning (well, reminder should I say) for me this week was that you need a buffer for life events. They always happen when you don’t expect them, disturbing your well-prepared plan in two seconds.
Priorities shift.
Which reminds me of my coach insisting that I keep building my flexibility muscle, as it will serve me as much in work as it will for life overall.
So, yup, this week: flexibility muscle strengthening.
The edge
My most uncomfortable thingy this week is that I still do WAY to many things manually. Starting with Kit and the progressive onboarding.
But that’s a good thing, as it allows me to see each and every angle and possible corner cases of the stuff. So when we get to automate part (all?!) of it, we will know what to do.
Indeed, if you automate things too early or because maybe it could be useful, then that can become waste, and that’s not lean. And we’re a calm AND lean company ;)
So I’m really excited by Patrik’s next release which is exactly about this.
That’s gonna allow me to buy back time that I can spend on the product itself (note: if you didn’t read it, I recommend the book “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell).
Note to a friend
Be like a river and live with the flow to avoid useless fatigue, instead of being the rock in the middle of the same river which resists painfully.
Note for you the reader: I may copy-paste that part more than once in the upcoming months, just so I ingest it fully ;)
Tool of the week
Brain.fm
I got a year of access to it thanks to a newsletter I already pay for.
The goal? Get you focused and “in the zone” to experience Deep Work sessions when you need them.
I don’t know if it’s because I have a clearer brain thanks to my GTD/Walter setup that I finalized a few months ago, or if the thing really works to keep you in the flow for 1-3h in a row, but the fact is that I keep coming back to opening Brain.fm instead of Spotify or Apple Music when I need to strongly focus.
But the guy who recommended it to me is a trustworthy person, and told me that many people using it come back to it.
It’s also backed up by science, as the company claimed (I didn’t check the details too closely).
If you try it, let me know what your experience is.
On my end, once my yearly “free” subscription ends, I will see if I pay for it or not. That’s gonna be a good judge of the value of the thing ;)