Elliot C Smith

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Latest — 07 May 2026

Don't sell the build effort.

There's a trend I have noticed when folks try sell software, their perception of how hard it was to build the software influences their comfort in setting a price. More difficult to build, more expensive. Easy to build, we can't charge a premium for that! This

More issues

Build 'Taste' for the critics but 'Care' for the fans.

There are a lot of folks out there tell you that what matters now is 'taste'. Some loosely defined term that boils down to "know if the output is slop or not slop". While it is probably a useful skill, I'd argue the thing

Findings, April 2026

Products, games, books and links * I watched Company Retreat. The bits for the audience are a bit odd but they continue to find the all around nicest folks to star on this show. It felt like it happened a lot faster than the previous show but still overall a good

I'm long on software engineering

Somebody asked me recently if I thought we would need more or less software engineers in the future. If it wasn't obvious form the title my answer was 'more'. They were asking in the context of AI code generation but my feelings on the matter apply

Spreadsheets and Disposable Software

A trend I am seeing, and experiencing, is an increase in disposable software. Software that does a little thing, for a little while and then gets deleted. No long term plan for maintenance or support. Like everything, there's positives and negatives to the change. Overall I see more

Web Scale has changed.

Writing an application that supports millions of users is much more difficult than writing one that supports hundreds. Historically, B2B SaaS apps aimed to grow big enough to need to worry about supporting that many users. Thousands of companies with thousands of employees. Having done that work gave you a

Findings, March 2026

Products, Games, Books and Links * Like many other folks I know, I spent a lot of time in March playing Slay the Spire 2. It's still in early access but already feels like it's improved on the original. A statement I don't make lightly.

Some thoughts after shipping a project 95% written by Claude

I ran this as an experiment. It was a side project I was probably never going to get around to building. I wanted to test the most extreme version of "Let Claude Do the Work" and see where it got to. I avoided plugins and just ran the

Product Teams vs Feature Teams in an AI world.

All the way back in 2019, Marty Cagan wrote an article titled "Product vs Feature Teams". If you're building things you should read it in full but right now I want to take a look at how these ideas land as more and more teams are

Build SaaS with Strong Opinions

The SaaS product of the future is there to force you into best practice, not to let you configure your way there.