Drawer 05 · 298 notes · 90 people · 2014–2026

Building AI products

AI-native products, evals, agents, and how AI changes product work

Q:
Answers from Building AI products notes, cited
Lenny’s Podcast116 min

OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more

Kevin Weil · Apr 10, 2025
Key learnings
  • Build products at the edge of current model capabilities, since models improve every few months and a barely-working product can…
  • Treat evals as unit tests for models: define hero use cases, write evals for them, and hill-climb on those evals to know whether…
  • Expect AI behavior to be fuzzy: a model right 60%, 95%, or 99.5% of the time implies very different product designs, so study…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 578

How to build AI product sense

Feb 3, 2026 · 34 min
Subscriber post — summary only

Tal and Aman argue that the fastest way to build intuition for AI products is to use coding agents like Cursor for non-technical product work rather than consumer chat tools. The post walks readers through setup, model…

Lenny’s Podcast128 min

Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history

Nick Turley · Aug 9, 2025
Key learnings
  • Ship early to learn what people actually want; with AI, the valuable behaviors are emergent, so you won't know what to polish…
  • Treat the model itself as a product: iterate on it using real user use cases, personality/vibe checks, and new capabilities like…
  • Set the team's pace deliberately by asking whether work is 'maximally accelerated', separating fast product iteration from…
Lenny’s Newsletter · Free post♥ 724

Build your personal AI copilot

Jul 22, 2025 · 27 min

“One of my favorite collaborators, Tal Raviv, is back with another incredible piece that will change how many of you operate at work. If you’re looking for the promised AI productivity gains everyone’s talking about, start here. For more from Tal, check out his 63 free video tutorials on using AI agents at work, his other guest post, “PM is an unfair role. So work unfairly”, and his episode on Lenny’s Podcast. You can also book Tal for…”

Lenny’s Podcast93 min

Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next

Mike Krieger · Jun 5, 2025
Key learnings
  • Use AI as an independent strategy critic: ask it to be brutal or to challenge your thinking, since default prompts tend to…
  • As AI writes most code, bottlenecks shift upstream to deciding what to build and aligning people, and downstream to merge queues…
  • Give teams a minimum viable strategy so people feel empowered to build and explore at the edge of model capabilities without…
Lenny’s Podcast153 min

Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet

Marc Andreessen · Jan 29, 2026
Key learnings
  • Expect AI to make already-skilled people far more capable; the gains are largest for those who pair deep expertise with AI tools.
  • Rather than fearing job loss, focus on task loss: jobs persist while the individual tasks composing them shift, which is how…
  • Combine at least two or three domains deeply (e.g., coding, product, design); the combination of skills creates far more value…
Lenny’s Podcast128 min

The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code

Dan Shipper · Jul 17, 2025
Key learnings
  • Non-programmers can use Claude Code-style command-line agents with local files to process large text sets, like meeting notes or…
  • Hire or assign someone to an AI operations role who continuously turns repetitive team tasks into prompts and workflows, and make…
  • Apply 'compounding engineering': spend a bit of effort turning each recurring task (like writing PRDs) into a reusable prompt or…
Lenny’s Podcast109 min

A rational conversation on where AI is actually going

Benedict Evans · May 31, 2026
Key learnings
  • Treat AI as roughly as big as the internet or mobile, and recognize we are early, like 1997, with most applications not yet built…
  • Expect adoption to be very uneven; survey data shows many people are not using AI at all, so don't assume the people in your…
  • Ask whether a job is a task that can be automated or a deeper outcome; consultants and professionals are hired for judgment…
Lenny’s Podcast89 min

The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using

Michael Truell · May 1, 2025
Key learnings
  • Build the product you and your team actually use every day (dogfooding) so you never ship anything that isn't genuinely useful…
  • When working with AI coding tools, chop tasks into small specify-generate-review loops rather than handing over one giant…
  • Spend time on side projects deliberately pushing AI to its limits to build a calibrated gut feeling for what current models can…
Lenny’s Podcast111 min

He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor on the future of careers, coding, agents, and more

Bret Taylor · Jul 31, 2025
Key learnings
  • Don't just digitize what existed before; rebuild the experience natively for the new platform so customers have a reason to…
  • Ask yourself what the most impactful thing is today, and reflect on whether you're choosing it out of comfort or because it's…
  • Be skeptical of your own storytelling: customer reasons given to salespeople can mask deeper product problems, so seek…
Lenny’s Podcast64 min

AI and product management

Marily Nika · Feb 5, 2023
Key learnings
  • Avoid the shiny object trap: only add AI when there is a real, well-defined pain point worth solving, and identify the problem…
  • Don't use AI for an MVP; fake the AI behavior with a clickable prototype and test desirability with users first.
  • Use ChatGPT as a sounding board for sharpening mission statements and generating user segments, personas, and motivations, while…
@ttorres · Teresa Torres on X♥ 97
"The only way to know if our AI products and workflows are any good is with evals." 💡 If you're using AI to write PRDs, analyze customer feedback, or build customer-facing AI products, you need to understand evals. This guide breaks down what evals actually are and why product teams should be…
@lennysan · Lenny Rachitsky on X♥ 968
My conversation with Head of ChatGPT and Codex, @thsottiaux We discuss: 🔸 Why the model picker is likely going away 🔸 Why loops and graphs are a passing phase 🔸 Why most actions on the internet will soon be taken by agents 🔸 OpenAI’s approach to AI safety Listen now 👇
Lenny’s Podcast79 min

Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people

Anton Osika · Mar 9, 2025
Key learnings
  • Be precise and explicit when prompting an AI builder: say exactly what you expect and which parts are not working, rather than…
  • Use the agent's chat mode to ask how something works or why it isn't doing what you want; this builds understanding while you…
  • Expect to spend a full week taking one real problem from idea to a working product that people use; Anton suggests that alone…
Lenny’s Podcast100 min

Jenny Wen

Jenny Wen · Mar 1, 2026
Key learnings
  • Classic linear design process (research, diverge, converge) is breaking down as engineers ship prototypes quickly; designers…
  • Design work is splitting into two modes: supporting implementation and setting a vision, where the vision now often spans three…
  • Designers can use coding tools to do last-mile polish and prototype in real code, rather than waiting on engineers for every…
Lenny’s Podcast117 min

AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t

Sander Schulhoff · Jun 19, 2025
Key learnings
  • Prompt engineering remains valuable: Sander argues that bad prompts can drop accuracy near zero on a task while good prompts can…
  • Few-shot prompting is the highest-impact basic technique: give the model several examples of what good output looks like, using a…
  • Ask the model to decompose a problem by first listing the subproblems it needs to solve, then solving each one before answering…
@ttorres · Teresa Torres on X♥ 18
"I'm going to tell you my story because I think it's an amazing story of continuous improvement, of how teeny-tiny steps compound over time." Over the past year, my work has transformed completely—and it all started with a broken ankle and a willingness to get curious about AI. In this article, I…
Lenny’s Podcast134 min

From skeptic to true believer: How OpenClaw changed my life

Claire Vo · Mar 29, 2026
Key learnings
  • Run several purpose-built agents instead of one general agent; splitting tasks keeps each agent's context focused and reduces…
  • Install OpenClaw on a separate clean machine such as an old laptop or Mac Mini, with its own local admin account, rather than…
  • Onboard the agent like a new employee: give it its own email and calendar, share access selectively, and expand trust…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 839

Everyone should be using Claude Code more

Oct 14, 2025 · 20 min
Subscriber post — summary only

Lenny Rachitsky argues that non-technical people should use Claude Code, which he frames as a local-feeling AI agent that can act on files and tools on a computer. The post walks through installation steps, shows five…