The AI gold rush feels like it rewards teams who ship fast. Many teams are working on a 9-9-6 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) schedule to keep up with the state of the art breakthroughs and features. Does this give teams an edge against their competition or is this slowly burning teams out.
If you're building in the AI space, I would love to hear what your take is:

• What works for your team and do you follow the 996 schedule?

• Did following a 996 culture create more bugs or actually lead to breakthroughs and push you ahead of your competition?

• How would you balance your life outside of work if you followed this schedule?

Making this post to raise awareness and ideally find a middle ground for teams that are currently growing and trying to keep up with the competition

Hey, I m Alex Saint

I m a solo indie hacker based in Paris, and fun fact I only started coding thanks to AI tools. I got inspired watching Marc Lou s videos on YouTube, picked up some tools, started building and tweeting.

Curious what the community is running for authentication/authorization in their apps (e.g. Auth0, Supabase Auth, Clerk, Firebase Auth, Cognito, etc.)

A few things I'd love to hear your take on:

• What provider are you using and what's your primary stack? (e.g. Next.js + Clerk, Go + Auth0, etc.)

• What's the one thing that surprised you , good or bad ?

• Would you make the same call today? Especially curious if you've hit scaling pain.

For context: I'm building a B2C application with my own database layer, and currently in the process of evaluating which authentication provider best fits the architecture. Trying to understand how others are handling the auth <> database relationship and what influenced your final decision.

Exactly one week from now, I ll be co-organising a tech event (a hackathon), and I m realising how much work it actually takes. I ve been to many conferences myself to gather inspiration, but I still can t come close to what I ve experienced as an attendee. Maybe that s also because we re organising it as just a 3-person team.

If you ve been to hackathons or other tech events before, what made a positive impression on you?

I bet you learned and experienced a ton over the past 365 days. All those lessons are pure gold you can carry into the future, especially into 2026.

So, what s the single most valuable piece of business advice you would give your 2026 self right now?

We ve been growing really fast (30%+ MoM ARR) at @Basedash since launching last year. Most of that growth has been the result of hard work, but we ve also had a secret weapon: an AI agent that acts as both a data analyst and a PM, working 24/7 to optimize our product s activation and conversion rates.

For decades, companies have been making product decisions based on intuition and manual data analysis. We wanted to see what would happen if AI could take the wheel completely.

Today we hit $2K MRR for our startup, Ferndesk

It took 2 months to build it to the point were we were comfortable launching
It took 3 months get to $1K MRR
It took 2.5 months get to $2K MRR