... 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. It's NBER working paper 35275, Demirer, Musolff and Yang - "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code." More than 500,000 GitHub developers, matched against their actual AI usage telemetry rather than a survey, in a matched event study design. The headline numbers are large and I have no interest in arguing with them. Cumulative ... ... them code. However, my own rule is part of the bottleneck. I wrote it after the FAQ spent months recommending a tool for audio we already generate, so it's a brake I installed on purpose Comment from Mona

... Apple's own support pages. Apple In-App Purchase: 26%, or 15% if you're in the Small Business Program, the Mini Apps or Video Partner Programs, or on an auto-renewable subscription after the subscriber's first year. Alternative payment processing inside your app: 20%, or 10% for those same groups. Out-of-app offers with an actionable link: a 15% store services commission, or 10% for those groups, on anything bought within 7 days of the tap. Apps ... ... distributed outside the App Store entirely - an alternative

... Three numbers from it get quoted. Users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits; users who didn't, 15%. Users ended their browsing session 26% of the time with an AI summary present versus 16% without. And the one that should matter most to anyone buying GEO: users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in 1% of visits. One per cent. That is the click value of the thing the entire optimisation ... ... more often. Just 8% of one- or two-word searches produced one. For searches of ten words or more, 53%. For searches starting with a question word - who, what, when, why - 60%. Sit with that next to the 8%-versus

... line appears in both: starting September 2026, you're required to indicate whether your app or game includes social media capabilities in order to submit new versions or updates to the App Store, or for notarization for distribution on alternative marketplaces. It's September. It's live. I read both pages this week rather than the coverage, partly because Murror is the kind of app where the answer isn't obvious, and partly because the second-order effects aren ... ... allowances are in actual minutes. And "visibly spreads content to many users" has no threshold attached to it that I can find. If your feature is genuinely borderline, the person to ask is App Review, not me. Comment from Mona

... times. I'm a founder, not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice - but the arithmetic of which paragraph applies to you is something you can do yourself in twenty minutes, and it's cheaper than the alternative. Comment from Mikkel Larsen(@mikkellarsen): The voice note trap is such a good catch. Text feels safe voice flips the category entirely. Are you parking that feature for now or exploring a lawyer friendly implementation first? Comment from Siarhei Hamanovich ... ... haven't signed the Code of Practice. What I did change is when the decision happens. Marking is an export-time decision rather than a UI one, and every file already out there predates whatever you decide Comment from Mona

... could have. And I still don't have a clean answer on the verification-method question, because the honest version is that I don't yet know what I'd do differently with a government-ID-checked 16 versus a self-declared one. I'd rather say that than write a paragraph pretending I've resolved it. The thing I am confident about is narrower. The signal is sparse for a long while yet. Texas only covers accounts created after ... ... near the analytics payload. Your point about writing your own definition of a significant update is the same story. I agree with it. I do not know what that test looks like for a model swap Comment from Mona

... categories on purpose, and write down why. Not because Cloudflare's defaults are wrong, mostly they're reasonable, but because a default you never chose becomes a strategy by attrition. This one has a date on it. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @yelyzaveta_kibets  Serdar's answer is the right one for diagnosing after the fact, and I'd add the reason it can't help you before the 15th: nothing has happened yet. The reclassification ... ... point that a drop has many parents is the bit I'll be repeating to the developers I work with, because I would have read it as a block too. Thanks for being that precise about it. Comment from Mona

... real person uses is enormous, and that gap is where products in spaces like mine quietly disappear. I don't have this solved. I've just stopped assuming the name is the thing that gets found. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @jernej_jan_kocica  That's a sharper version of the same problem and I hadn't connected them. A directory category is someone else's taxonomy, and if your product doesn't sit cleanly ... ... early, the request is still pending with their catalogue team. worth knowing before you try it: we asked for help desk, got declined, and their rules say a declined category can never be requested again. Comment from Mona

... destination? If the value is a result someone wants and doesn't care how they got an action then being agent-callable is close to free distribution and you should be looking hard at it before your competitor does. If the value is the experience of a person actually being there a destination then racing to become a tool call is optimizing for a future where your product's whole reason for existing has been abstracted away. Worse ... ... server fastest. They'll be the ones who were honest about whether they should and, if they did, treated that borrowed trust like it was hard to get. Because it is. Comment from Gal Dayan(@galdayan): the action vs

... late, or produced an output a user cannot trust enough to act on. The eval set that ends up mattering is usually a small pile of real sessions tagged by failure mode rather than benchmark name. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @getosmo  "Tagged by failure mode rather than benchmark name" is the line I wish I'd written. That's the whole thing. Once the cases are organized by how it breaks, the set stops being a scorecard ...

... Mona, a marketer turned founder from Germany. I'm building Xolora, a marketing analytics tool dedicated to solopreneurs and small business owners. I noticed that 80% of that niche is overwhelmed with their marketing and just guessing. When it comes to ads, this means that they're wasting money (around $10,000/year). And the sad truth is that there is no tool out there, that helps them. All the other marketing tools are made for marketers or big teams ... ... underserved niche. Xolora's goal is to simplify ad analytics, give back time, money and ultimately confidence. It just launched in beta and I hope that it will be valuable for its users. What is your niche? Comment from Mona

... judgment, your ability to stay steady when the feedback is loud and instant and mostly noise. In 2026, taking care of the builder is not self-help fluff. It's the actual bottleneck. Treat it like one. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @omri_ben_shoham1   "defending a decision I hadn't finished making yet" is a sharper way of putting it than I managed in the whole post that's the trap exactly. The thing that made ... ... making the judging block boring and fixed: same time each day, numbers only, no building allowed. Once it's scheduled, mid-build me stops treating every quiet hour as a verdict. Really glad it landed for you. Comment from Mona

... this: if building is no longer the moat, then the moat is available to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work. Knowing your person. Owning a relationship instead of renting attention. Being early to a workflow before a competitor gets embedded in it. None of that requires funding or a team. It requires you to stop hiding in the part of the work that feels productive and go do the part that actually decides whether the thing lives. Ship ... ... weekend, sure. Just don't confuse the weekend with the work. Comment from Mona

... best day, on a task you made up. Your users meet it on an average day, on the task they actually have. Build for the average day. That's the whole game now. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @magdalena_anderson   Yeah the first time we graded the model on ten real, messy sessions instead of a clean benchmark, the number dropped hard, and that drop was the most useful thing we learned all quarter. The public score describes ... ... task none of your users are actually doing. One thing that surprised us: half the value was just re-reading the transcripts ourselves, before we even scored anything. Comment from Mona

... answer. Have you found anything that actually works for tracking this over time, even roughly? That feels like the missing half everyone can see the problem now, but almost nobody can see if they're fixing it. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @raffay_sajjad  That "a little scared of what it says back" is exactly the right feeling to have before running it. Mine came back describing a version of the product we'd moved past a year ... ... what my product does in one plain sentence to a person, no model's doing it for me either. Going to actually run the three-assistant test tonight, a little scared of what it says back. Comment from Mona

... inside your app if they can only feel understood while they're talking to your model you haven't solved loneliness. You've made it more comfortable to stay lonely. You've built a very sophisticated waiting room. The alternative is to design for the exit. Concretely, that means three things. Point users back at real people, not deeper into the app. The most valuable thing an emotional AI can do isn't be a better listener than your friends ... ... about: when your user closes the app, are they better off, or just less alone for the next four minutes? Your roadmap already knows the answer. The question is whether your metrics will let you admit it. Comment from Mona

... builders land on this. When you imagine your product working perfectly, does usage go up forever, or does someone get what they needed and walk away? And which one were you actually optimizing for? Comment from Stacy Wycoff(@stacywycof83995): Mona, this is the question I keep circling back to while building FounderFlow. My honest answer is uncomfortable, I want usage to go down over time, not up. If it is doing its job, a founder should need fewer ... ... like proof of value to an investor, but for the actual founder using it, quiet is the win. How are you thinking about measuring a product that is supposed to make itself less necessary? Comment from Asad M.(@asadmalik901): Mona

... refuse to build, even when users are asking for it and the metrics say yes. Anyone else held the line on a feature like this? Curious how you explain the "no" to users who genuinely want it. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @asadmalik901  "Reading it as a report of a moment" that reframe is going to stick with me. You're right that it changes everything about how we respond. We've actually started experimenting with exactly what ... ... framing is spot on. We've been saying what we don't do instead of what we protect. "The AI waits until you're done" is a much better way to explain it. Thank you for this. Comment from Mona

... animation and 8 seconds of silence. Our engineer thought it was a bug when he first saw the spec. "You want me to add... a delay?" Yes. On purpose. Here's why. We ran an experiment: instant AI response vs. an 8-second pause before the same response. The content was identical. The only difference was time. Users who got the pause rated the AI's reflections 40% more helpful. Same words. Same insights. They just felt more considered ... ... user has a second to sit with what they just wrote before getting a response back. the pause does something to the user's own processing regardless of what they believe about the AI side of it. Comment from Mona

... language explainer of a chunk of the codebase, not because you need it day to day, but so there's a paper trail you can hand your CTO when something breaks and speed matters more than pride Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @omri_ben_shoham1  still early days for the side project, so I haven't truly hit that wall yet. but I can feel it approaching. right now iteration is fast because the features are small ... ... able to reason about the whole architecture will start to compound, exactly like you're describing. I think the honest answer is I'm one major refactor away from finding out whether this approach scales or breaks. Comment from Mona

... forgotten isn't a privacy feature. It's a trust feature. People will only be truly honest with technology that promises not to remember everything. Has anyone else experienced this tension between data retention and user trust? Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @galdayan  the triangulation risk is a really important flag and honestly not something we've stress-tested yet at 12+ months. you're right that individually non-identifying snapshots could combine into something more revealing over ... ... ceiling like capping the number of retained summaries or letting older ones decay into even broader categories. but we haven't implemented anything yet. adding this to our privacy audit for Q3. appreciate you pushing on it. Comment from Mona

... compliance tax, it's an engagement feature. For an app holding people's emotional interior, those two things converging is exactly right: the user's sense of a private space IS the product. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @galdayan   That's such a sharp observation -- the "performing for the app" thing is exactly what we saw too. To your question: so far, the data suggests that user-initiated analysis feels different from auto-triggered analysis ... ... being watched. That said, we're keeping an eye on it. If we see the opt-in rate declining over time without a corresponding drop in journaling quality, that could signal exactly the fatigue you're describing. Comment from Mona

... They want the outcome AI enables. The moment you lead with the technology instead of the transformation, you attract curiosity instead of commitment. Anyone else found that de-emphasizing "AI" in positioning actually improved their product metrics? Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @yudhish_khatri  Great question! Yes, we're fully transparent about it. Our privacy policy and How It Works section explain that AI powers the journaling prompts and emotional pattern analysis. We're not hiding ... ... kang1): This makes a lot of sense. AI gets people curious, but the actual outcome is what makes them stay. For something emotional or personal, leading with the benefit feels way stronger than leading with the tech. Comment from Mona

... slides into "it looked plausible," and plausible is where AI work fails. What saves me is writing down one concrete thing the output has to pass before I see it, so judgment doesn't drift into vibes. Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): Reading all of these and honestly feeling seen. @Nitesh Kumar I don't think deep technical expertise becomes less valuable I think it splits. There will always be people who need to understand what's happening under ...

... taking sessions she listens to me a lot and then ask questions accordingly she is not throwing questions but also giving some response so I still don t know whether ai can replace human side of things Comment from Mona Truong(@monatruong_murror): @divvsaxena   That means a lot, thank you! And honestly, that's exactly the use case we designed for -- those moments when you need to process something but don't have someone available to talk ... ... conversation, but it can help you sort through your thoughts so that when you do talk to someone, you're more clear about what you actually feel and need. Really glad it's helping you that way! Comment from Mona