Elliot C Smith | Posts about Dev, Startups, and Product

Outpacing the Spiral

Engineering Theatre

Input based pricing vs Output based pricing

Want taste? Eat your slop.

Five styles of 'AI Product Development'

You can just do things.

Raising the floor, lowering the ceiling

Quick thoughts on AI in Game Dev

All the other bottlenecks

Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization

Findings, May 2026

Momentum is the Safest Moat

Don't sell the build effort.

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

Findings, April 2026

I'm long on software engineering

Spreadsheets and Disposable Software

Web Scale has changed.

Findings, March 2026

Some thoughts after shipping a project 95% written by Claude

Product Teams vs Feature Teams in an AI world.

Build SaaS with Strong Opinions

What do AI based layoffs say about their ability to scale?

Are they software companies or do they just have software problems?

Findings, Feb 2026

Reflection on revamping our sales process

The unbound potential of open tabs

Findings, Jan 2026

How to, mostly, guarantee success in your career

Things I changed my mind about in 2025

Doing more things just for the hell of it.

Has AI removed the appeal of vertical SaaS?

Playing around with Google Stitch

Ball x Pit is pretty good.

Some games are a guilty pleasure

Get Good - Is Silksong too hard?

OKR Hierarchy - Detail not Distance

Sword of the Sea Review

Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity

Donkey Kong Bananza Review

Duck Detective The Ghost of Glamping Review

He is Coming Early Access Review

9 Kings Early Access Review

Common modes of communication failure

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review

Spinning up SaaS in an service business : Lessons Learned

Things I've Done: Maxwell Plus

Color TV and Chat GPT

Infinite Avocados

I Very Much Recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl

Experiments are Bricks

Dinner Party Software

Is retention is the only real measure of product market fit?

Drafters, Editors and Critics

My very-much-overkill video call setup

The Accuracy of the Incumbent

Cautions on being 'experiment driven'