AI changes *Nothing* — Dax Raad, OpenCode

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2025-11-23

YouTube video id: o3gmwzo-Mik

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3gmwzo-Mik

So, I was told that this could be
between five and 55 minutes long, quite
a range, and that I could yap and go on
whatever side tangent I wanted, and
it'll be fine. So, I'm just prepping you
and giving you some explanation for why
this is the way it is. Uh, so my name is
Dax. I work on a project called Open
Code. It is one of the most used coding
agents out there. Uh, it's fully open
source, works with any model. Um, every
other company likes to say we have the
smartest coding agent. Well, we've got
the hottest coding agent. You go take a
look at it. It's a great experience. Uh,
awesome UX, totally themeable,
personalizable, fun fun project to use.
Uh, that's all the shilling I'm going to
do for now. Um, but let's get into the
meat of this talk. So, what I want to
talk about today is why AI is not going
to make you a winner. Um, we're at an AI
conference. There's a ton of AI content
out there. It's all anyone's ever
talking about these days. You got lots
of people saying that this is the
future. It changes everything. The way
like software development is going to
change. Software development is not
going to exist. You've got all these
crazy proclamations about how suddenly
everything is different and if you hop
on, you're going to be able to get the
benefits. Um, and some of that is, you
know, there's some truth to that to some
degree, but I want to focus on the stuff
that hasn't changed, the stuff that AI
is not going to help you with. Uh, the
things that are critical to make a
successful product that people use,
these things haven't changed. They're
not going to change anytime soon. And to
be honest, AI has not really helped us
with them. So, I'm going to talk about
things in terms of funnel. If you think
about I'm making a product, I've got
users that I want to start using my
product. They start from knowing nothing
about you to hearing about you to trying
your product to liking it to then like
fully converting. Uh if we think about
that journey, there are critical
moments. I'm going to identify three
critical moments that you need to focus
on. And
it's this has been true since for I mean
my whole career. It hasn't changed. It's
the things that I think about every
single day that I struggle with. uh
despite all the experience I have, it's
still very very challenging and the AI
stuff really hasn't done much for me.
So, let's yeah, let's get started with
the first one. So, the absolute top of
the funnel is marketing. And I'm going
to say off the bat that what I'm about
to say, you're going to feel a ton of
resistance to. So, I'm going to preface
that off the bat cuz I remember when I
felt that way. Uh and it took a lot of
effort in getting over like my own
psychology uh to do this part. Well, um,
the idea behind marketing is simple. You
have someone that's going about their
day. They got their problems. They got
their worries. They're focused on their
life. They do not give a about you
or what you're doing. You have to figure
out how to get them to stop in their
tracks, drop everything else that they
have, and look at you and think about
you and look into what you're offering
them. This is a really, really high bar
to clear. Um, and I think when I talk
about it in this way, the reason people
feel resistance is because most of us
aren't good at this. You know, it's a
skill like anything else, you are not
going to be amazing at it from day one.
It's way outside your comfort zone.
Unfortunately, a lot of people's
reactions to that truth is that they
feel like they shouldn't have to deal
with this problem. Uh, there's a lot of
thoughts like, "Hey, if my product is
good enough, it'll sell itself. Um, I
don't need to do marketing. I don't need
to do things that are gimmicky. You
know, I'm above that. The truth is,
there's people that make products that
are better than anything you're ever
going to do in your whole life. Like the
absolute best products out there, they
still have to think about this problem.
So, if they're not too good to think
about, hey, how do I get people's
attention? Neither are you. Neither am
I. Like, we all just just got to do it.
So, I might as well start to get good at
it. Um, the way that I like to think
about it is
you need to do things that have a shot
at being shared. So, if you think about
standard marketing, people will write a
blog post about a new feature or they'll
hire an influencer to like talk about
the new feature or just kind of the
things that pretty much anyone can do.
Uh, you know, everyone just buys
billboards these days for some reason.
The thing with these efforts are they
make sense, you know, you're like
telling people about the thing you
built, but there's basically zero chance
that somebody sees that and they're
like, "Oh yeah, I got to show my friends
this blog post about this 76 feature,
this product release, right? No one's
getting excited about that. They're
probably going to scroll right past." I
mean, you know what people are like
these days. You're all on TikTok. I know
your attention spans are just basically
deteriorating into nothing. Uh, no one
can focus on something that's boring.
Um, so none of these things really count
as top level marketing. They're not
stopping someone who doesn't know about
you to start thinking about you. Uh, the
key here is to come up with something
that someone's going to see and they're
going to think it's so crazy or so funny
or so uh, deep or so, you know, it it
strikes a chord where they're like, I
got to show this to my friends, to my
co-workers. uh can you believe that they
did this? You know, you want to elicit
that type of uh emotion from someone.
The as simple as that bar is, you know,
it's very easy to tell whether
something's going to clear that bar or
not. It's extremely hard to come up with
ideas that do clear that bar. Um so
that's the challenge. You got to be
creative. You got to come up with ideas
that work. Uh and you're going to miss a
lot. It's just like swinging at
products. You're aiming for a hit.
You're going to swing a lot and a lot of
times you're going to miss. That's true
of marketing as well. Don't bother
taking shots that never have a chance of
being a hit, right? That's just a waste
of time. Um, it's okay to try nine times
on something embarrassing or crazy and
doesn't work, but that one that hits,
it's going to be seen by a million
people and your target audience is going
to be in that group or connected to that
group. Uh, and if you repeat this over
and over, that compounds, you get better
at it. Top level marketing, amazing. The
reason AI doesn't help here is it's all
about creativity. I have not had a
single good idea come out of AI. Even
[snorts] when I use it as like a
brainstorming partner, it like just gets
super corny. Uh just it just can't come
with anything that's cool. Like it you
can't do cool. Uh and top level
marketing is about is about cool. And
that sounds like an innate thing, but it
is a skill that that you can learn.
Okay. So now that you have someone that
is interested in what you're doing, you
got their attention. The next thing to
figure out is how to get them to the aha
moment. So, if you think about great
products, there's a moment where you've
had a certain interaction with the
product where it clicked for you. You
got what it was about. You were sold on
it. Uh, and you're like, "This is
awesome." And even if it wasn't for you,
you might think, "This isn't for me, but
this is cool enough that if I know
someone that it is for, I'm going to
recommend it to them." So, that is the
aha moment. You need to figure out what
is the singular aha moment in your
product and eliminate friction
ruthlessly to get someone to that aha
moment as fast as possible. So the
challenges here are
you might feel like oh there's a lot of
good features in my app. You know I want
them to know about features A B C. You
you have to be brutal. You kind of have
to like you know kill your children
here. You have to pick the one that
matters the most and deprioritize
everything else and look at every single
step that it's going to take for someone
to get there and cut it. When I use
products, like when someone sends me
like, oh, like I'm building this thing,
let me try it. The feeling like I get
this crazy amount of pain cuz I see all
the steps that it takes before I even
get to the point where I even understand
what the heck they're doing. Uh, and I
know that at each point they're losing
10% of their people, 20% of their
people. And I know that the percentage
of people making it to the end are so
small before we can even talk about
whether, hey, is the thing you're
building that useful? Uh, this is
another thing that almost no companies
get, right? Like, think about when
you're signing up for something, they
ask such stupid up front before you
even know if you want the thing. They're
like, "How big is your company? Like,
how many employees do you have? What's
your title?" like who cares about any of
this? You got to cut all of that out to
get people to the moment that that you
care about. And if you're able to do
this, that's how you build a product
that, you know, really starts to take
off, uh, really starts to grow itself.
All that work you did for the top level
marketing, if only like 3% of people are
getting to the aha moment, uh, you know,
that that's a total waste. The the hard
part, the other hard part is like maybe
you don't even have an aha moment. Um,
that makes you think a lot about, hey,
what am I even building? What am I
doing? Is is this is this worth the
effort and pain of trying to build
something. Uh, and I think it's worth
looking at some of the most successful
products of all time. Uh, some of them
have some like crazy crazy aha moments,
right? You think about chat GPT, which
is the most successful product, I would
say, consumer product ever that has
existed in in our lifetime. uh they give
you an input box where you can type
anything and you're going to get like a
humanlike interaction as a response.
Like literally anything in the world you
can type. That's like an insane aha
moment, right? The moment you see that,
like the dumbest person in the world can
use that, they can be like, "Yeah, this
is awesome. I get it." Uh it's very very
very compelling. Uh on the social media
side, right? You have something like
Facebook. uh you have a crush and you
can like send a poke to your crush where
you're like kind of flirting but it's
deniable. Instant aha moment like you
are sold on this product. You're going
to keep using it. Um so those are like
very extreme examples but every product
should have a singular moment where
you're like this is the reason I exist.
This is the reason why we're doing all
of this. Uh people that experience it
should get it. Um, again, the reason why
AI doesn't help with any of this is,
again, it goes back to creativity and
really understanding this space. Uh,
spend a lot of time thinking about it,
[clears throat] like gaining clarity,
like thinking about positioning, uh,
thinking about what you're doing unique
that nobody else is doing. All very,
very hard. You know, just cuz we have AI
that we can talk to, it's not suddenly
going to turn you into a winner at
making like, you know, amazing aha
moments. the people that are good at
that very very few people in the world
are going to keep doing that and keep
crushing the rest of us. Uh so again
another thing that we have no choice but
to try to get good at. So the last part
of this funnel is the retention side. So
let's say you've gotten the attention of
someone. You managed to get them to the
aha moment. They like what you're doing.
They're now like using your product. How
do you retain them for life? Like how do
you get a customer forever? Uh if you
aren't getting customers forever, you're
just leaking people through and you're
going to hit a ceiling on your business
and it's not going to be fun. Like it's
it's annoying when you grow on one side
but you're leaking on the other side.
You really want to get people for life.
So that number of customers you're
serving is compounding over time. Um
retention is interesting because you
have to think about it kind of
differently than the last two phases
because it's all about power users,
right? It's all about someone that's
using your product for a while that's
pushing the limits of what they can do
with it. They want things to be more
configurable. Uh they want more advanced
features. You have uh teams using it.
You have larger enterprises using it.
They have very specific needs. How do
you build things that support all of
that without sacrificing all the stuff
we did in the first two phases of
keeping things simple, having a very
streamlined initial first experience? Uh
it's hard to juggle both of these both
of these things. uh we've kind of been
forced to think about this because we
have been doing open source work uh for
me personally it's been like five or six
years now. Um open source products are
interesting because they are used by
both like a random indiv individual
hobbyists that just want something that
they can use uh that's simple and free
and whatever. Uh but also open source
projects are some of the best choices
for like mega enterprise companies,
right? These giant companies uh
typically want to run everything
themselves. They want to host everything
themselves. They're very sensitive about
uh data going anywhere else. Uh so open
source projects have this requirement of
supporting both like the really simple
case and both the really advanced case.
Uh the way we go about this is there's
kind of this there's like this I would
say misconception that products can
either be simple or they can be capable
and they'll say like oh we're like Apple
we're building a simple experience but
what they're usually doing is just
building an incapable experience and
they're saying that oh we're like Apple
cuz it's the simple experience. There's
actually no trade-off between these two
things. You can build both a simple and
capable experience. Uh the way to do
this, it's just it's just more work up
front, right? You think about a feature
you want to build that uh makes a lot of
sense for users. Instead of building the
feature, you kind of have to build
primitives that can be assembled into
that feature. So you think about the
primitive layers first, make them uh
pretty wide scoping, u make them really
advanced, really powerful. Then you take
those primitives and assemble your
simple experience that 99% of people
experience. Uh the what the nice thing
about doing it in this order is when
they get more complex, you can give them
more direct access to these underlying
primitives. They can get more advanced.
They can flex and bend your product and
hopefully they never need to outgrow it,
right? Because the key here is you don't
want to build a product that people
outgrow. uh because you're effectively
serving as a funnel for someone else's
product, whatever they whatever they
outgrow into. Uh so I really like
building things where think about like
everything we ever want to do and build
a set of primitives that can eventually
do those things and assemble our product
using those primitives. Uh this is
another area where AI does not really
help me because
it's like so hard, right? the building
and trying to build these set of
primitives is how you even figure out
what primitives to need primitives you
need and what you're trying to do. uh
that exploration process like sure you
can like again chat with AI brainstorm
but this isn't the type of thing that
like you to even like communicate to AI
what you want to do you have to
understand it really well yourself and
that's a task a task is to understand
what you're trying to do really really
well uh so this is a again a very
critical part of making a successful
product um
AI is not going to suddenly make you
amazing at it just it you just can't it
takes a lot of work, time, energy, uh,
until your brain can wrap its head
around the space you're working to
design the right set of primitives that
can kind of scale to to all these
situations. All right, so the last thing
I'll leave you all with is if you go and
try out Open Code, uh, and you go
through the full process that I just
talked about, you're going to find a lot
to criticize. You're going to be like,
he's not following his own advice here,
here, and here. And the reason that's
happening is even though I can
understand all this stuff and to the
degree where I can talk about it and
articulate it, it's just hard. It's very
hard to follow this advice. It's simple
to understand, I think. But executing it
well daytoday,
there's no getting around the fact that
it's enormously difficult and it takes
so much out of a person, a team to line
everything up to get it all working
perfectly right. Uh AI is amazing and
lets us do all kinds of things that we
couldn't do before. Does not save us
from that day-to-day pain uh in trying
to make something that's great. So yeah,
I wanted to do a talk that was about AI,
but kind of I'm tired of people feeling
like suddenly the tables are going to
turn and things are going to be easier.
They're not easier. My life is just as
hard as it's ever been. It's just as
hard as it's ever been to do something
amazing. But it's also where all the fun
comes from, where all the purpose comes
from. And people are worried about like,
oh, people are going to like not have
any purpose with with AI. Uh, no, that's
not going to be a problem because, you
know, things are just as hard as as they
ever were. So, I hope that inspires you,
scares you, I don't know, makes you sad,
makes you happy. I don't know how you're
going to feel about this, but that's all
I have. Thanks for thanks for listening.
>> [clears throat]