This was a weekend experiment to see what is possible with long horizon agents, which is the pattern of using role-based agents on top of some sort of task store.
As someone who has taken on-call rotation and maintenance work at many a startup, this is the pattern that I would have liked to have had.
Fun to build and would certainly do so again next time I'm doing a production-ready build. Would be exciting to add product analytics having the agent do minor feature work too, with it's own A/B testing of the results.
I love what Resend are doing and am a customer. I can also absolutely empathise as our lead engineer did exactly the same thing at a startup I was running a decade ago. It's a horrible situation.
But yeah, both the incident and the report are really tough to read. It would be great if they can do a follow-up with further actions they're taking.
There's a neo-bank called Revolut that allegedly at one point had just two teams: "go fast" and "don't screw it up". I feel like an infrastructure play needs some dedicated hires in camp 2.
My company recently ran a survey of UK-based Creatives on the topic of their working preferences (n=250, July 2023) - so I compared our data to responses provided by Roundtable.ai
The average delta across 11 questions between actual selected response % and simulated %, across 11 questions was 7%. Seems like a good start - it would make it useful for certain low-impact, high-speed business decisions.
I'm launching a plugin for Figma that reduces meetings in the design process. It works by letting designers share work through a link with a video intro attached - and then get video feedback.
Everything works in the browser, so unlike other screen recording tools, your collaborators don't need to install anything. You can send a prototype to a dozen test users, or a client, or a manager - and get video feedback on the same day.
The people who could benefit most are freelance UX / designers and remote/hybrid-working startups. The idea actually came about when I was running a previous tech startup (Rota.com), and I was frustrated with the number of meetings to discuss product feedback. (Our team at Opine is also zero-meeting-by-default, except 1-1's).
There are a couple of other cool features - feedback videos are transcribed, and the ChatGPT generates a to-do list for the designer. People can whiteboard on the work, or add Figma-style comments, keeping all your feedback in one place.
Everything is updated in real- time, and there is a chat thread beside your work if you need to discuss things. The end result is design work is finalised significantly faster. One team in our beta decreased their time to deliver from 29 days to 19 days.
I've spent the last 6 months building a free project manager designed for creatives. The focus is on video feedback and keeping big projects organised (unlike the mess you sometimes get in Figma).
I'm a designer and software developer from London, and I built this with a UX and design team based in Ukraine and Belarus.
I started this after I had a really frustrating experience typing out feedback to a branding consultant on a different project. Trying to explain my feedback in words just wasn't working, and the process of doing everything on calls seemed super slow.
Before starting any coding, I did customer interviews with 30 designers and design agency owners to validate the idea. What came back was that slow feedback was a common problem. And hopefully, video feedback would be a good solution.
Obviously, video isn't new. I've been a big user of Loom this year, but the experience of getting a link and either losing it in Slack or Figma comments just didn't really work for me. I wanted something where video feedback automatically attaches to the work in a timeline, along with any new versions of the work. Loom also requires an install and a bit of "habit forming", which can be obstacles to getting clients using it.
The other feedback tool we've used is comments in Figma, but the issue there is that big Figma files get messy. This can be really confusing for feedback providers - it's often not clear which frames need feedback and what's finished work, and so on. So we ended up building a Trello-style Kanban board into Opine, so you can always see which work is in progress or ready to review.
The idea is - keep the creative chaos in Figma, and the organised collaboration in Opine - and use a plugin to sync the two.
So... here it is!
Really keen to hear what you think of the project.
Also happy to talk about what it's like developing a real-time project management SaaS .
Hey! Founder of The Ultimate Video Game Addiction Course [0], I've coached people through it, and about a decade ago I wracked up several thousand hours myself.
It's a really difficult issue to experience and the fact that you can face it and start to solve it is a huge step. Kudos to you.
Yes it's possible to play in moderation - I play poker and chess with friends. That said, I do my best to cut off anything if I see the warning signs of slipping back into bad habits.
Be VERY careful about watching games online - it's usually a powerful trigger.
For a few tactical pieces of advice for anyone who isn't "clean" yet:
- Changing the wiring in your brain takes time. Do your best to build new habits away from gaming each day, but know that it's unlikely to happen all at once.
- Take note of triggers (people, times of day, locations) and do what you can to remove them from your environment.
- Remove access as much as you can. If you can't do it all at once, set yourself smaller (regular) goals like being off of games for 30 mins, or for 4 hours, or for 1 day once per week. Eventually I did 1 year without a smartphone or a computer that could play games, and it really helped reset.
- You need to replace friends and activities you had with new ones outside of gaming. This takes a fair amount of work and time, but it's worth it. Self-improvement is a great area to focus on as it can give you the same sense of progression as games, and you'll meet great people. I also recommend team sports.
- Have a long hard look at anything that could be causing this escapism - it could be big and obvious, it could be subtle like a nagging stress from work, a mild existential anxiety, or one of a million other things. Journalling helps uncover this sort of thing.
- Embrace boredom. After the initial discomfort, you'll realise the boredom is not the worst thing in the world.
This was a weekend experiment to see what is possible with long horizon agents, which is the pattern of using role-based agents on top of some sort of task store.
As someone who has taken on-call rotation and maintenance work at many a startup, this is the pattern that I would have liked to have had.
Fun to build and would certainly do so again next time I'm doing a production-ready build. Would be exciting to add product analytics having the agent do minor feature work too, with it's own A/B testing of the results.