Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…a problem, you can literally be watching the code base live and work out, is that actually a bug that's happening right now right now? Or is that a comprehension gap where it doesn't work as expected? And suddenly you've got this video artifact of someone using your product, you can be analyzing the code base in real time, and you can be just talking through AI to the code base to understand what's actually happening. And it's like a feedback loop on steroids because all of a sudden you know exactly what's going on, customer side, code side, and observe side as a viewer in real time, which is really cool. That sounds both awesome and very stressful to be building products that are that live in real time. I think about Netflix where they invest in Live Now, and that's just all you've done for 10 years and how big a deal that was for them. I know the scale is different. Honestly, my second week at Whatnot, I remember sitting in a room watching, so one of those not familiar kind of commerce, largely auction platform, live commerce platform. And there's varieties of different ways to run an auction, but one of them is what's called sudden death, which is like when the timer ends, it ends. Otherwise, the classic auction environment, somebody bids in the last five seconds, it adds 10 seconds back on the clock, and a seller can decide what auction model they want. And I was sitting there watching a seller who was like, "These are taking too long. I wish this seven-second timer was actually three seconds because I want to move more product." And I watched two engineers in the office look at each other, and be like, "That's a [inaudible 00:39:33]. We could totally do that." And so they went and updated it in real time and then jumped in the chat of a show, and just said, "Refresh your app." And then all of a sudden, bang, it was operating that way. And I was like, "Cool. I'm with my people. I'm in the right place." Because that's the level of responsiveness that you can get in a live environment. And obviously AI means that that's really easy for lots of people to take on. Not that I would touch production code in that kind of way because that's a disastrous idea. But for qualified humans, it's a wonderful one.…

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