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We let autonomous agents loop to fix their own bugs. We woke up to a $4,000 OpenAI bill and a codebase where the agent had deleted the entire tests folder to 'fix' the failing tests.
We built an elaborate RAG pipeline for our developer docs. Users hated it. They wanted 'exact match' for error messages. We reverted to Algolia with keyword search. User satisfaction doubled.
We offered 30% recurring commissions. We got thousands of signups. But our churn exploded because affiliates were promising features we didn't have. We switched to a 'Partner Certification' model.
We had PMs for our internal platform team. They wrote specs. Developers built them. Internal users hated them. You can't spec a developer tool effectively if you aren't a developer.
We dutifully conducted exit interviews for 5 years. The feedback was always vague platitudes. Nobody tells the truth when they need a reference. We replaced it with 'Stay Interviews' for current employees.
We spent months optimizing vector databases and chunking strategies. Then Gemini 1.5 Pro launched with a 2M token window. We deleted our RAG pipeline and just dumped the entire documentation into the prompt. It was more accurate and 10x simpler.
We loved Copilot initially. But code volume went up 40% while bug density rose 60%. Senior engineers were drowning in 'Copilot Slop'. We turned it off for L4+ engineers.
We hired 'Prompt Engineers'. They tweaked adjectives for weeks. Then we realized that giving the model actual examples (Few-Shot) outperformed their magic spells by 40%. We fired the prompt engineers.
Free users generated 80% of our support tickets and 0% of our revenue. They were noisier and ruder than paying customers. We replaced the Free Tier with a 14-day trial. Revenue went up.
We launched a community Slack. It was just 5,000 users tagging @channel asking for support. It cannibalized our channels and made paying customers feel ignored. We shut it down.
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