Perspectives
First-person takes from John Wang, founder of ProductBuildersHQ. Where Signals map what others are saying, Perspectives are our own — staked alongside the practitioners the field is watching, and offering the rarer vantage among them: a product manager, not an engineer, making the crossing into product building.
For what the field's leading voices — Andrew Ng, Steve Yegge, Andrej Karpathy, Boris Cherny — are saying about the same shift, and how it maps to the frameworks, see Signals →
AI Is a Coworker, Not an Exoskeleton
The exoskeleton makes you a stronger individual contributor. The coworker makes you a company of one.
Ben Gregory says AI is an exoskeleton, not a coworker. For the ProductBuilder it is exactly backwards — and the difference decides whether you can ever scale past your own two hands.
AI Didn't Make Me Type Faster. It Made My Platform Compound.
A year of building, read off my own instrumentation — and the number that shows what actually changed: not lines written, but how deeply I now build on my own work.
A year of AI product-building, read off my own VisionStudio instrumentation. The real change AI made was not speed or lines of code — it was leverage: apps that now compose dozens of my own internal libraries, a depth of reuse that only became feasible with an agent as coworker. With the full Leverage Graph, and an honest ledger of what the numbers do not flatter.
Harnessed Agents: Field Notes from an AI Tinkerers Dinner
Twenty operators shipping agents to production, one theme: the bottleneck is not capability, it is control. Three things I brought to the table.
Notes from an off-the-record AI Tinkerers dinner in San Francisco on harnessing agents in production — three field answers on coding at scale without slop, deterministic guardrails for non-deterministic agents, and why releases beat rebuilding from spec.
Everyone at the Frontier Built Their Own Governor
For most of this year, the tools to govern AI coding agents didn't exist yet — so the people pushing hardest built their own. Now the market is racing to catch up.
Spotify built Honk. Steve Yegge built Gas Town. I built VisionStudio. The pattern is not vanity — when the tools to govern AI agents at scale did not exist yet, the frontier rolled its own, and the tool you ship is the one you build after the problem finally teaches you its shape. Now the market is catching up.