KJ Hardrict

new vlog up: day in the life of a startup founder. a full day of building @TalvyHQ, start to finish. 9am to 11:17pm. six hours of meetings, features to ship for multiple customers, all while managing the rest of the team. as a founder, you never really switch off. even at our Wednesday team lunch, with people i genuinely love, there's a pressure in the back of my head to "get back to it." , and oftentimes those thoughts keep me up until 2 AM. but regardless of how tired i may be, I still don't miss those laker games with my dad. people often wonder if the grind's "worth it." to me, it is. but only if you remember to make the time for the people you're doing all the work for. give it a look if you're curious.

If you had to build Google from scratch with AI, how many days do you think it would take? more or less than a year?

if an AI is ever doing something like this, which 99% of the time it won't, it's just a specification issue on the user-side. posts like this just scare people from trying AI on more ambitious tasks imo which i think is a net-negative for society.

underrated experience: teaching someone who never saw themselves as technical how to use AI. i’ve seen friends go from fearing Codex to dreaming up workflows and niche software they want to build for fun this is not just the era of automation. it’s the age of imagination.

crazy how you can now build multiple projects in one day that each would've gotten you a FAANG interview years ago. even crazier that you don't need to be "cracked" to do it.

Five questions I'd ask myself before touching another AI tool: 1. What have I done five times that I'm about to do a sixth time? 2. What do I do every day that I've just accepted is how it has to be done? 3. If I got those hours back, what would I do with them? 4. Which parts of my day feel below what I'm capable of? 5. Which parts would I keep even if AI could do it?

smh just went to a founder party and they were playing FMK but the only options were frontier AI models.

I wonder how many great ideas we've lost because people couldn't vibe code them pre-AI. This is why it's so important to write every idea you have down, because we now live in a time where the distance between your light-bulb moment, and the luminescence of it being visible to the world is incredibly small. It no longer matters what your background is, because the friction of technical creation is gone. We need to start unlearning. Too many people still mentally live in a world where there were limits to what they could build. That is not the world of today. and we are never going back.

if AI can create any idea you or another company has with one prompt, then what exactly is the difference between your product and a competitor's?

AI has exponentially decreased the lifespan of original ideas. the insight that took you years to develop into a product is now a few well-worded prompts away from being fully replicated by someone else. what does this do to the marketplace?

we got people still using AI to write emails and summarize documents. meanwhile, a small minority are using it to automate entire workflows and fundamentally change how they operate. the gap between those two groups is going to get so ridiculous over these next few years. if you're in the know, this is incredibly exciting. but if you know people who aren't, it feels a little scary to watch them get left behind in real time.

the moat is finding your ubermensch. the moat is developing your 1-of-1 gifts. the moat is taking care of your mind/body. the moat is being kind to others, regardless of what they can offer you. the moat is choosing enduring aspirations over fleeting fun. the moat choosing fun when ambition becomes superficial. the moat is keeping faith. the moat is having friends or family to call when things get hard. the moat is allowing your curiosity to guide you through the problems you're solving. the moat is your ability to learn from failures. the moat is compassion. the moat is living a life you love.

the future belongs to people with great ideas, high risk-tolerance, and an ability to consistently show up for their vision until it's realized.

It’s never been easier to build you dream life, you just have to do 3 things: 1. find your passion. 2. keep exploring your passion until you develop a craft that other people find valuable. 3. learn AI so you can pair your skill set with the capabilities you need to turn your ideas into reality.

if AI models stopped improving today, how many years do you think we'd spend finding use cases for them?

the irony of Gen-Z' choosing not to invest time into learning AI because they think “it’s a bubble” is actually generational. because they’d probably find it impossible to believe that their parents or grandparents ever thought the internet was just a fad. imagine opting out of learning a technology because you think the hype around it is overblown, only to realize years later that you opted out of learning one of the most important tools of your generation.

maybe i'm not great at imagining worst-case scenarios. but i feel like if you're in good health, taking steps in the right direction professionally, showing up for your relationships, and making a conscious effort to improve at least a little everyday things will be okay.

AI killed stock photos

AI is making lazy people lazier and ambitious people more ambitious because it makes it easier to achieve whatever you were intending to achieve on a given day. If pre-AI you were comfortable with your life, you’ll do the same amount of work in less time. But if you were ambitious, you’ll use that extra time to do even more. AI doesn’t necessarily change what you want out of life. It just makes it easier to get there. And I think that’s going to make the gap between people who are content with where they are and people who want more increasingly obvious.