Question Every Instinct

Since shipping Raily, we get a ton of suggestions every day.

They all sound reasonable. They all sound like the obvious next step. But I've noticed that most of them, if you just follow your gut and do them, are wrong.

I mean it. All wrong.

Example one. We have a RedNote group of about 1000 people dropping feedback all day. A bunch of people told me: you should build a RedNote agent. Have the agent read the group messages, turn them into a requirements doc, then you can build the requested features faster and you don't have to keep providing emotional value in the group.

I told them: you're dead wrong. Completely wrong. Absurdly wrong.

First, the reason we built this group is to learn how to do ops. We've been writing fucking code for five years. Why would we want to learn more code? What we need to learn right now is how to give people emotional value. That's our current bottleneck. Not code.

Second, building a RedNote scraper agent walks straight into anti-bot hell. It's a bottomless pit. Burns time, burns brain, returns close to zero.

What's the right move? You provide the emotional value yourself, in the group, and while you're at it you distill the requirements yourself. Once the requirements are clean, you hand them to Claude Code or Codex and let it write the code. That's the right way.

And the technical difficulty of that second half is zero. That's literally today's workflow. Right?

Following the gut, you were going to use the agent for the part that's most worth doing by hand, and spend your own time on the part the agent is best at. Completely flipped.

Example two. We started doing writing, and people said: you should add email subscriptions.

Nope.

Email is a thing on the way out. If my read is right, we're heading into a zero-token era. Everyone will have their own AI agent.

So what should we build? A CLI, or an MCP, so people can plug their agents in.

Whenever their agent wants to read our writing, it can just ask the AI. The AI summarizes, extracts, translates into whatever language. That's how the consumption is going to happen.

Or, if they want it automated, their agent crawls our site on a schedule and pulls in the new content.

So the move is not to embed a chatbot widget on the page, and not to slap on an email subscription button. The move is to make our site more agent-friendly. Easier to read, easier to parse, easier to consume.

Following the gut, you were trying to keep people on your webpage. But the future is that people aren't going to come to your webpage at all.

So now, every time I hear a suggestion or feel an instinct, I stop.

I ask: which era does this instinct come from? Is it a paradigm from the previous era? Is it my old comfort zone?

Most of the time, the answer is yes.