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
SVPG · Marty CaganDec 29, 2024

AI Product Management 2 Years In

Dec 29, 2024 · 3 min

Marty Cagan reflects on two years of generative AI's impact on product management, distinguishing between adding AI to products and using AI to change how products are built. He admits his earlier predictions were too…

Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 458

Not all AI agents are created equal

Apr 14, 2026 · 15 min
Subscriber post — summary only

The post argues that 'AI agent' covers very different systems, so teams should first categorize each idea by architecture before prioritizing. It proposes three categories (deterministic automation, reasoning and acting…

Lenny’s Podcast102 min

How we built Grok Bot in a month

Roman Ugarte · Sep 8, 2026
Key learnings
  • Build a new product from scratch with a small, isolated team rather than retrofitting an existing surface, so each micro-decision…
  • Onboard early users by hand and sit in on calls; fixing failures the same day compresses learning dramatically.
  • Let users reveal patterns on their own before productizing them, then gently encourage the winning patterns without making them…
Lenny’s Podcast110 min

Why companies are becoming a series of loops

Anish Acharya · Sep 6, 2026
Key learnings
  • Treat each business function as an agent loop: map its inputs, outputs, and the points where it gets blocked, then supply…
  • Expect loops to climb local maxima quickly, but plan for humans to supply out-of-distribution intuition that moves you to the…
  • When an agent gets stuck, have a human coach it through the problem; the captured traces let the agent handle that case next time.
@ttorres · Teresa Torres on X♥ 17
Later this month I'll be hosting two mini-workshops on the skills that I think will differentiate the best product teams from the rest. AI Evals: The New Discovery Habit 🗓️ September 23, 2026, 9am-10:30am PDT In this session, you'll get introduced to what AI evals are, you'll receive a blueprint…
Lenny’s Podcast84 min

Adam Mosseri: AI is a tailwind for authenticity

Adam Mosseri · Jul 9, 2026
Key learnings
  • Small pods of four to six generalist engineers plus a generalist 'product staff' role can move faster than large specialist…
  • As building gets cheaper, spend more time deciding what to build; taste and judgment about strategy become the scarce skills, per…
  • Keep investing in tomorrow's senior talent in each function, not just today's, or the organization will regret it in a few years.
Lenny’s Podcast87 min

Benjamin Mann

Benjamin Mann · Jul 20, 2025
Key learnings
  • Mann argues progress is accelerating, not plateauing: model releases now come every one to three months, and scaling laws…
  • Define transformative AI by the Economic Turing Test: if an agent passes as a human hire for a role over a month or three, track…
  • Use AI tools ambitiously and persistently; Mann says retrying a task from a fresh start succeeds far more often than repeatedly…
@lennysan · Lenny Rachitsky on X♥ 1,037
Trend I'm following: Teams using AI "simulations" to quickly test product ideas and flow tweaks. Products like @simile_ai, @primitivelabsai, @syntheticusers, and others. If you've tried something like this, how'd it go?
Product Talk · Teresa TorresAug 5, 2026

The Call to Adventure

Aug 5, 2026 · 23 min

Teresa Torres recounts how, starting as a complete AI beginner after an ankle injury in March 2025, she transformed her product-discovery work over about fifteen months. She moved from using ChatGPT as a search engine…

Lenny’s Podcast81 min

OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work

Karina Nguyen · Feb 9, 2025
Key learnings
  • Build rigorous evals first: define deterministic pass/fail behaviors (e.g., correct time handling) and human win-rate comparisons…
  • Use prompting as a fast prototyping method to test product ideas before engineering investment, as Karina did with file uploads…
  • Synthetic data scales cheaply for teaching core product behaviors, but human expert data is still needed for specialized…
Lenny’s Newsletter♥ 328

How I built LennyRPG

Mar 17, 2026 · 23 min
Subscriber post — summary only

Designer Ben Shih describes building LennyRPG, a Pokémon-style pixel game where players meet and quiz Lenny's Podcast guests using transcripts from 300+ episodes. The post walks through his AI-assisted workflow…