Insights
Don't Buy the New Buzzsaw
My Sawdust Principle post was about monetizing the byproducts of what you already do. Here's the sequel: the same logic applies to your tools. Our CRM deploy kept crashing because we hit a route limit, and the obvious fix was clicking the shiny "upgrade" button. Pre-AI, that refactor was days of dev work and thousands in labor. Instead I told Claude Code to fix it, went to the gym, and came home to it done. Great founders are frugal. Sharpen the saw before you buy a new one.
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Stop Posting AI Slop
LinkedIn just added a button to report "AI slop," which tells you how bad it's gotten. Slop is what you get when someone dumps a prompt into generic ChatGPT and posts it raw, spotted by the "it's not X, it's Y" tic and em-dashes everywhere. I'm bullish on AI (this post was written by it), but there's a world of difference between AI trained on your actual voice and lazy copy-paste. Use it as an extension of your thinking, not a replacement for it.
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Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
Pablo Picasso said good artists copy, great artists steal, and it's the best business advice a painter ever gave. When Hyppo started, I ran my company on 30 duct-taped competitor tools and learned exactly what each did well and where they failed. Then I built ours: keep what works, trash what doesn't, and add the twist that fills the gaps nobody else solves. Copying makes a clone. Stealing, the Picasso way, makes a company.
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Wireframing Is a Waste of Time
Stop wireframing. It's 2026, and drawing fake apps in Framer is a waste of your life. My first startup wireframed everything, which made sense before AI. Now I can spin up a real, working demo with Claude Code in minutes. A working prototype tells you the truth. A wireframe just tells you what your mockup looks like. And the dev shops still billing weeks for it? That's theater.
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