Caleb Jonathan

I believe that cloud providers should make hard spending caps the default: when you hit your limit, everything stops, rather than you getting a warning email you only see after the damage.

The reason is simple: coding agents can now ship code that burns through paid APIs while you sleep.

We had a profile completion meter and a nagging banner that followed users until they filled it out. Completion rate after 90 days: 26%.

We removed the meter and the banner for a test group. Completion rate in that group: 24%. Statistically unchanged.

We analyzed 9,300 support conversations over 8 months. Median first-response time: 4h 20m.

But 68% of tickets contained a follow-up from the user that included the answer a screenshot, an error code, a version number, or a clarification that made the original question answerable. The user had solved it themselves, or had found the missing detail, while waiting.

Median time between the user's first message and their second: 2h 10m. In other words, the user was doing our triage for us, slowly, because we asked too late.

We added a short intake form with three required fields: what you did, what you expected, what happened. Tickets dropped 18%. First-response time dropped to 1h 40m. The conversations that remained were more answerable on the first try.