Amy Bradley

The one where a big grouped inbox stops making you wait a full minute to open an email. Turns out asking SQLite to rescan the whole folder once per message is bad for business. Who knew. (We should have.)

Faster

• Grouped inboxes are fast again. Picking the newest message in each thread used to walk the entire folder once per message. That's quadratic, and on a 15k-message inbox it took over a minute, and every other read waited in line behind it. So after launch you got a blank list and a nice long think. One new index later, the same query takes 68 s 20 ms. A test now pins the query plan so it can't quietly come back.

• Inline images no longer freeze the window while a sync is running. They're now loaded off the UI thread, where they should have been all along.

New

It seems to me that the framing of many of the posts that I have seen on here involves looking for "the one growth hack" that got traction for someone's product; but in reading the specifics, it often turns out that they simply did good old-fashioned marketing work: answered all the comments, personally on-boarded early users, wrote substantive content rather than promotional content. That's not hacking; that's marketing done well.

I find myself wondering whether the growth hacking framing is harming entrepreneurs in searching for a shortcut that allows them to avoid the boring work, when it is the boring work that actually brings traction.

A new NBER paper tracks 500,000+ GitHub developers against their actual AI telemetry. The task-level gains are enormous and they mostly don't survive the trip to a shipped release. Across four app marketplaces: a sharp rise in new apps, no rise in total usage.

Most of the AI-productivity argument you've read this year is two camps shouting single numbers at each other. There's a paper out that makes both camps right and is more useful than either, and the revised version went up this month, so it's worth twenty minutes before you write your Q4 plan.