Elliot C Smith
Posts on product, software development, building companies and other things I find interesting.
AI / MLSoftware / engineering practiceEngineering management / careers
- Posts
- 152 from 2 May 2017 to 27 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (35 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://www.elliotcsmith.com/rss/
2026 35
- Flavors of Ambition
- Book Review(s): Ana and Din Mysteries
- Outpacing the Spiral
- Engineering Theatre
- Input based pricing vs Output based pricing
- Want taste? Eat your slop.
- Five styles of 'AI Product Development'
- You can just do things.
- Raising the floor, lowering the ceiling
- Quick thoughts on AI in Game Dev
- All the other bottlenecks
- Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization
- Findings, May 2026
- Momentum is the Safest Moat
- Don't sell the build effort.
- Build 'Taste' for the critics but 'Care' for the fans.
- Findings, April 2026
- I'm long on software engineering
- Spreadsheets and Disposable Software
- Web Scale has changed.
- Findings, March 2026
- Some thoughts after shipping a project 95% written by Claude
- Product Teams vs Feature Teams in an AI world.
- Build SaaS with Strong Opinions
- What do AI based layoffs say about their ability to scale?
- Are they software companies or do they just have software problems?
- Findings, Feb 2026
- Reflection on revamping our sales process
- The unbound potential of open tabs
- Findings, Jan 2026
- How to, mostly, guarantee success in your career
- Things I changed my mind about in 2025
- Doing more things just for the hell of it.
- Has AI removed the appeal of vertical SaaS?
- Playing around with Google Stitch
2025 41
- Ball x Pit is pretty good.
- Some games are a guilty pleasure
- Get Good - Is Silksong too hard?
- OKR Hierarchy - Detail not Distance
- Sword of the Sea Review
- Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity
- Donkey Kong Bananza Review
- Duck Detective The Ghost of Glamping Review
- He is Coming Early Access Review
- 9 Kings Early Access Review
- Common modes of communication failure
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review
- Spinning up SaaS in an service business : Lessons Learned
- Things I've Done: Maxwell Plus
- Color TV and Chat GPT
- Infinite Avocados
- I Very Much Recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl
- Experiments are Bricks
- Dinner Party Software
- Is retention is the only real measure of product market fit?
- Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition Review
- Drafters, Editors and Critics
- Blue Prince Review
- My very-much-overkill video call setup
- Did the Switch 2 paint itself into a corner?
- The Accuracy of the Incumbent
- Cautions on being 'experiment driven'
- Make more Solo CRPGs
- Game Guides
- Compressed Complexity
- Monster Hunter Wilds Review
- Avowed Review
- You can’t delete the default
- If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric.
- Red Bubble, Green Bubble
- Second Principles
- Heroes of Hammerwatch II
- Barnacle processes
- Is Sonic (or at least Shadow) back?
- Balatro is a special kind of good
- Manage risks, not methods.
2024 30
- Maxwell Plus - Lessons Learned
- Thoughts on service and tech startups
- Let your users start over
- The Signal and the Noise Review
- Lessons from one too many model spreadsheets
- Kingdom Two Crowns: Call of Olympus
- The Plucky Squire
- Nodebuster
- Know which type of goals you're chasing
- Tiny Rogues
- Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous
- Sea of Stars
- Thronefall
- Talk to your users
- Outer Wilds
- Talented
- Notes from the four Silicon Valley Product Group Books
- Against the Storm
- Chants of Sennaar
- Cocoon
- Avoiding antipatterns in product discovery
- Book Review: INSPIRED by Marty Cagan of SVPG
- The Minimum Marketable Difference
- My path to working in Product
- Products Should Solve Real Problems
- Making a living when AI raises the bar.
- Edits and Egos
- Performance vs Diagnostic Metrics
- Chat is poor UX for most users.
- How to avoid picking terrible metrics
2023 8
- Three things that helped my side projects drag on for years.
- The hardest part of prioritising product
- Write more crappy blog posts
- Just because it's old, doesn't make it tech debt.
- Zero to Production in Rust - Book Review
- Population Density
- Assuming everyone is a gullible moron
- What makes a model a Foundation Model?
2022 28
- The Frontiers of Knowledge - Book Review
- To Sleep in a Sea of Stars - Book Review
- Findings #10
- Findings #9
- A look back at twenty years of writing code
- Findings #8
- Findings #7
- Findings #6
- We are linear minds in an exponential world
- Findings #5
- Findings #4
- Collaborative AI as a path to AGI
- Findings #3
- Findings #2
- Little by little, then all at once
- Findings #1
- Will we mourn for Siri?
- Unbundling health on the path to value-based care
- Can AI help when it's "more of an art than a science"?
- Personalisation and Curation
- AI will come for knowledge work, 3 ways we might respond.
- The importance of picking the right loss function
- Debaters, Inflaters and the polarisation of online discussion.
- Things I've Done: My PhD
- AI and Helmer's 7 Powers
- Funhouse Mirrors
- Innovation Doesn't Work That Way
- Things I've Done: Pepster