Adam Foster

The rule is simple: if your product can do something, code should be able to do it too. Chat, reports, settings, whatever. One feature, two surfaces.

This has always been good practice, but agents just changed the math on it completely.

I talk to founders every week and the pattern repeats. The team needs login, someone says "how hard can a login form be," and two quarters later they are maintaining an identity system nobody wanted to own and the actual roadmap is on fire.

The problem is that auth looks like one feature but it is actually five products stacked on top of each other:

• Every sign-in method your users expect (passkeys alone took our team over 800 engineering hours to get production ready)

• Session management that survives a real security review, which arrives with 40 questions you have not thought about

• Token infrastructure, issuance, rotation, revocation, the part that pages someone at 2am

• Permissions, because plain roles stop working the moment your product grows

• And now identity for AI agents acting on behalf of your users, which no in-house auth from two years ago was designed for

Each of these is somebody's entire company. Your team will build all five as a side quest, and then maintain them forever.

As you may know, we just launched Dirac yesterday!

This is one small step towards building a better email for all of us who are stuck being our own email assistants.

The launch was incredibly fun for me as the Maker of Dirac. Many of you guys signed up for Dirac and our 100 founder members are starting to fill up spots.