28 years of flooring industry experience and now the leap to tech. Custom software
Joined March 2025
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Claude Opus 4.8 has been running RidgetopAi for 8 days now, have reset multiple threads and we keep shipping. /remote-control is a game changer. #Mandrel is our working database.
Hosting now. Visit ridgetopai.net/ and sign up to use #Mandrel for free. 7 spots open.
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RidgetopAi retweeted
Jun 15
I've been thinking a lot about this.
Some loose thoughts, on what I think contributes to the (perceived) lack of new businesses and software.
1.) AI is very unlike previous technology revolutions in one way: it's a text field that scales with your ambitions. If you don't know what to put in the text field, you won't get a lot out of it. And it's hard to know what to put in there.
Imagine if Cloud computing had been rolled out via a freeform text field in which you can type your wishes and people give you examples of text that worked for them. This matters a lot for adoption and diffusion of new technology.
2.) Knowledge about how to use AI compounds in strange ways. A friend of mine worked in a German non-tech company in sales when they rolled out AI, a 1.5 years ago: "courses" for AI, free ChatGPT accounts, prompt engineering, "You are a senior marketing leader creating the yearly presentation..." 95% of what they learned is now useless.
My own knowledge has grown, but it feels less like technical knowledge, more like instinct: pattern recognition, knowing when to take hands off the wheel, when to put them on again, when to restart, when to change approaches and prompts, ... How do you package and teach that to a whole company that's non-technical? Big effect on adoption.
3.) AI also changed what software gets shared. Why share something that barely cost you any effort and that took 5min? I can only speak for myself, but a lot of code that I previously shared online, I shared not necessarily because it was useful, but because I was proud of it: I learned a lot building it, I spent a lot of time on it, I tweaked it, I polished it. I shared because I wanted to say "I made this." I don't have that feeling when I prompt something into existence in 5min.
4.) At the same time, let's call it: it's unclear what software is worth building anymore.
When mobile happened, the app stores were full of tiny apps. People made money with them. Now, with AI, building tiny apps seems not worth the effort. Or B2B SaaS: it's not clear yet where we all will end up on build-vs-buy, but it's clear the tradeoffs have changed.
5.) Then there's this other tectonic plate moving: the models have been getting better, consistently. So even if you think "it's worth building this piece of software, because the models can't do this" — are you sure that's still the case in 6 months?
6.) Combine that and, well, I don't know how to better put it than: software to do x isn't valuable anymore, when you can get a model/agent to do x.
Take one of the most famous examples of indie hacker success: patio11's Bingo Card Creator, a website that lets you create bingo cards. Technically not that hard, but valuable to those who want to do x: create bingo cards. But now? I'm sure I can use ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude and they can create me bingo cards on demand. There might still be value in BCC as a piece of software (I haven't looked at it in a while), but my point is that it's very hard to know what software will be valuable, because "this software allows you to do x" isn't as valuable as it was 10 years ago.
7.) On top of all of that, adoption is jagged, in a very very strange way: the people who are maybe the least likely to appreciate the value of AI adopted it first.
Where AI works the best, by far, is software development. And who adopted it there first? People who are interested and passionate about software. But AI's progress shows us more than ever that software's value was never the software itself — it's the business outcomes it enables. Now, who's least likely to appreciate that? People who really valued software for being great software, regardless of business utility.
8.) In some sense, the ultimate user of AI is a founder or CEO: someone who wants to achieve business results and sees software as purely a means to an end. But the group that adopted it first has a lot of people who care more about the software than the business outcome. The ultimate user of AI might not be the person who loves making software. It might be the person who wants the result software used to produce.
This is a very interesting time to be in software.
You can finally say this without being canceled: AI isn't creating a Cambrian explosion of apps, if anything it's holding app creation back.
Earlier tech waves had 'the mythical man-month'. Our generation has 'the mythical AI engineer' who magically turns enormous token usage into equally enormously-adopted products.
Well, where are the apps and new businesses then? Because compared to prior cycles (e.g. the mobile app boom starting in 2010 or so), right now seems positively sterile, app and UX-wise. Other than Claude or ChatGPT itself, name a new app you use now you weren't already using five years ago?
It's a truism of tech that throwing more people and time at a product often results in only lack of focus, confusion, and yet more code to support.
This is the parable of the company that over-raised and over-hired and grew too quickly, and now has lots of mediocre, weakly-adopted products, internal communication problems, distracted leadership, code bloat, technical debt...and so the spiral begins, which ends with an apologetic CEO post after some layoffs announcing "we're refocusing on our core customer".
Every tech company announcing they're either lowering token caps or shifting to lower-priced models is essentially saying: "we o̵v̵e̵r̵-̵h̵i̵r̵e̵d̵ over-spent on tokens, and are scaling back to focus on our core product" blah blah blah...same same.
It's the corporate version of someone using AI to write a long email, someone else using AI to summarize it, and both sides would have been better off just writing a shorter email. But now, even small companies can have that same problem thanks to AI.
I refuse to believe that an LLM prompt is the teleological endpoint of human interaction with computer intelligence. The fact we've apparently recrudesced to CLIs, like me farting around with RedHat 7.1 in 2001, feels like a step back. Another world here has to be possible, and while I have every faith (as someone as deep in AI psychosis as the next person) that AI can help get us out of it...just racking up tokens costs isn't how we get there.
The AI Jesus isn't coming to save us, human taste, discernment, and radical re-invention will. Like Kafka wrote in his notebooks: "The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”
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Jun 14
Assign tasks in #Mandrel and have your Agent LOOP over them. DM me for free early access. Free, just provide feedback.
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Jun 14
Do you build everyday with AI?
Do you run loops and save to .md
Give your AI semantic search.
Zero install, secure url, isolated db.
Dm me for free access for feedback!
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Jun 14
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Jun 14
#Mandrel
113 contexts, all semantically searchable by AI. A complete history of the project from start to present.
This is how you maintain your projects. DM for free access.
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Jun 14
Lifetime Free Access: Have 7 more spots to test #Mandrel and give feedback. DM if you build everyday with AI and want easy way to manage your builds.
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Jun 13
Here’s a great example of why you should rent a VPS:
Power is out. But with Claude running on VPS in Tmux —> /remote-control from phone and still knocking out tasks.
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Jun 12
Give Feedback directly in #Mandrel, pings my phone, using ntfy.sh, can read on #Ridgetopai Dashboard.
Easy connection, personal containerized DB.
Give you agent space to store the context they need and let them work. All managed by you through #MandrelCommand https url uses JWT. Only you and your AI can connect to your data.
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Jun 12
Loop your Agent over tasks in #Mandrel.
Your data stays private and isolated with your own Docker container and DB.
DM me for early and free access.
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Jun 12
With how smart the models are giving them working memory allows you to maintain your project not just build it!
Come try #Mandrel for free!
Easy setup and you own your own database.
DM me for early access!
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Jun 12
Mandrel is live and looking for testers.
No downloads
2 lines can connected.
Your data is containerized and isolated.
Project Memory, designed to work with AI.
If you are interested and build everyday and are willing to give feedback, please reach out. You can shape Mandrel.
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