I ve lost count of how many habit tracking apps I ve installed and eventually deleted over the last few months.

They usually start off feeling super motivating for the first fortnight. But as soon as life gets busy and I inevitably break a 10-day streak the whole experience turns into a guilt trip instead of a helpful tool. The constant daily reminders just end up feeling like spam notifications.

Lately, I ve been thinking simple physical journals might actually work better than phone alerts.

How do you keep track of your daily goals without relying on gamified apps?

There was an option that defaulted to "log everything" in staging and "log nothing" in production, which seemed to make sense until we discovered that it had never been explicitly set for the new service. The new service would just inherit the logging behavior from production, which is none at all. We didn t see a thing going wrong for three weeks straight in one of our services.

The issue was not in the logic. The issue was that the reasonable default value meant there was an implicit decision made that nobody decided on.

Every notes app I tried had the same shape: a list on the left, a note on the right. And every one of them slowly became a filing job folders to maintain, notes to name, a structure to keep tidy before I could write anything.Hejour has no sidebar and no note list. There's one page per day. Today is always the page you land on. If something belongs to Thursday, you type @ and write a section for Thursday it shows up on both days.The thing I didn't expect: without a list, there's nothing to organise, so there's nothing to fall behind on. Two weeks of not writing leaves no mess.What's the one feature you'd remove from the notes app you use now? I'm genuinely collecting answers.

A thing that changed how we write code, not just how we use AI: error messages are prompts now.

Between actions, almost everything a coding agent knows about your running system is whatever the last tool call printed. When a test failure says expected 3, got 2 (missing: 'SKU-4431'), the agent greps the identifier, finds the site, fixes it two turns. When it says Error: operation failed, the agent guesses. Then guesses again. Same model, same bug. The difference is how much the failure told it.

The failures that end debugging loops instead of extending them tend to carry four things: a location down to the expression, expected-versus-got with actual values, identifiers specific enough to search for, and fix hints kept separate from the problem statement (a wrong hint is worse than none, because models weight hints heavily).

And there's a billing angle. Every extra turn re-sends the entire conversation context, so a vague error string quietly becomes one of the more expensive lines you ship it charges you a multiplier on every future debugging session that touches it.

Think about what an agent session actually risks. It edits files in a working tree. If that tree was clean when it started, the entire session's damage is one diff you can read and one reset you can throw away. Branches cost almost nothing, so every task can live on its own one, and merging stays a human decision made after reading the evidence.

Underneath that sits the layer most people only meet in a crisis: the reflog. Every commit, reset, rebase, and branch move leaves an entry, kept for 90 days by default even when nothing points at it anymore. For a month or three, almost nothing an agent does to your history with everyday commands is actually gone.

We once had to defeat this on purpose: a clean-room experiment required one commit to be truly unfindable. Deleting it took five deliberate steps remove the remote, delete branches and tags, expire the reflog, garbage-collect, verify. Five steps to lose one commit. That's the strongest endorsement of a safety net we know how to write.

What seems very common when it comes to advice for founders is:

• Write regularly on X

• Be on Reddit

• Build in the open

Not because there was anything wrong with the feedback per se but because I realized I was designing for the noisiest five percent rather than the quiet majority. I started looking at the usage data and doing two live calls a week instead. My roadmap got revised that month more than in the last six combined.

Do you have a rule of thumb regarding the relative value of public versus private feedback or does it depend on the particular feature?

A successful product is often seen as one that is well-commercialized, with users willing to pay for it. But is that always the case?

Today, I came across many products that are incredibly fun and creative. It made me wonder: are there products that don t fit the conventional definition of success? Maybe some exist just to bring joy, even if users simply visit, smile, and leave.

Some might argue that if something brings value, people will naturally be willing to pay. But is that always true?

Sharing progress is something I love. However, I am not a fan of the trend to share metrics on a daily basis and risk being considered shady if I didn t. I tried it for six weeks. Every day I would write posts about my revenue, follower numbers, and all the usual suspects. In the meantime, my actual building of the product was slowing down since I spent one hour a day writing about things that were not yet done.

Nothing terrible happened when I stopped. No loss in credibility and no customers who would blame me for being quiet.

With this whole AI trend, many tools are trying to be invisible: not apps you open, but helpers that quietly run in the background. They show up just enough interface: a chat box, a nudge, or an API call to deliver value, but otherwise stay out of sight.

With today s agent hype, this idea feels like it s accelerating. Agents promise to handle tasks across your apps without you lifting a finger.