Shipping with AI

Chapters

1. Chapter 1

   The kickoff prompt

   The first prompt does most of the steering.

2. Chapter 2

   Taste is the job

   A working version is where the editing starts.

3. Chapter 3

   Turn prompts into skills

   If I repeat a prompt, it becomes a skill.

4. Chapter 4

   The skipped edit

   Users feel a skipped edit before they can name it.

5. Chapter 5

   Ship at 80 percent

   You win by finding out faster.

6. Chapter 6

   How I actually use AI

   The ten lines I actually run.

Principles

You don’t win by being right. You win by finding out faster.

Ten things I’ve learned about shipping, across two startup exits and 90M+ users at Linktree. The tools come last.

1. 01

   Ship fast or die

   Ask what’s slowing you down and get rid of it: blocked tasks, too many meetings, fuzzy ownership, PR reviews. Find the 10% that gives you 90% of the value, and get it in front of real people. Nobody knows what works up front. The quickest way to find out is to put it in someone’s hands.

2. 02

   Don’t get attached

   Now that building is cheap, throwing code away costs nothing. Your first version is just a guess, so don’t get attached and keep iterating.

3. 03

   Call every customer

   At Fingertip we called every user. An actual phone call, then another one after they’d had a go with it. You hear the hesitation before someone works out how to say it politely. Ten people who need the thing will teach you more than a thousand who quite like it. Ring them and shut up while they talk. Skip it and you’ll ship a year of features nobody asked for, faster than anyone ever has.

4. 04

   Own it, then hand over the keys

   Kill off “that’s not my job” wherever it shows up. One person owns a feature the whole way through. If you can’t yet say what “done” looks like, sort that out first. Ownership doesn’t scale by doing more yourself. It scales by handing someone real authority and the accountability that goes with it, both at once. One without the other isn’t fair on anyone.

5. 05

   Build lots, keep it simple

   Solve your own problem, give the tool away, and show people how you did it. Find the little crux of each project and get it as simple as you can. Once it clicks, it’s like a ball rolling downhill.

6. 06

   Risk scales with blast radius

   An early MVP can ship fast and loose: push to main, get it in front of users. A platform with 90M+ people on it earns feature flags, staged rollouts, and proper review. The scariest code, anything touching money, tax, or permissions, earns stronger tests even when AI wrote it. CI going green doesn’t mean the product works.

7. 07

   Stay at the frontier

   Put yourself where you’ll learn the fastest, and keep learning the newest thing. Speed is a skill, and you only build it under pressure, when real people need a real answer and the deadline isn’t moving.

8. 08

   You can sense carelessness

   It’s the sum of all the small details that people pick up on, even the ones they’d never consciously notice. So generate fast, then go and sand down the rough edges, and keep sanding. The thing that still sets you apart is knowing what’s good and standing behind it.

9. 09

   Get in the room

   Play the long game and optimise for opportunities. Do the talks, build in public, help people when there’s nothing in it for you. You can’t plan luck, but you can give it more ways to find you.

10. 10

    Get it out of your head

    Don’t carry everything in your head. Put it in a system you trust, so you can be fully present on the one thing in front of you.

When AI can write anything, your edge is the stuff it can’t do: taste, ownership, being in the room.