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IRLY

Writing

Notes on building software with AI in the loop.

Things we have learned on real projects. Written by the people doing the work, for the people deciding whether to hire us.

  1. 4 min read

    The SaaSpocalypse is a rebuild problem

    A generation of software products raised on 2010s money has grown bloated, slow to change and expensive to keep. The companies that own them have two options, and one of them is watching their own people leave to build the replacement.

  2. 3 min read

    An update on the Cursor article

    In 2024 we wrote that a code editor with a language model inside it had changed the cost of software. Last week SpaceX completed a $60 billion purchase of the company that makes it. Notes on what we got right, what we missed, and the investment I did not make.

  3. 3 min read

    Connect what you have before you build anything new

    Claude and the Model Context Protocol let an AI assistant read from and act on the systems a business already runs. For a fair share of the requests we get, that is the whole answer, and it means building nothing.

  4. 2 min read

    "Can you finish off what I built in Lovable?"

    We get this question most weeks, with Lovable, Base44, Replit or something similar in the sentence. We would rather talk about why you want to build the thing than productionise what the tool produced.

  5. 4 min read

    Why we call them product engineers

    AI writes most of the code on our projects. It doesn't decide what to build or whether what came back is right. The people who do that hold two jobs that used to be kept apart, and the title should say so.

  6. 2 min read

    Spend the raise on selling

    Building the first version of a product used to eat most of a seed round. It no longer has to. Some of our earliest clients were founders we met at pitch events who were asking investors for the wrong thing.

  7. 3 min read

    The software lifecycle didn't get shorter. The gaps did.

    Most of the time on a software project is spent between the stages. That is where AI has changed the maths, and why a six-month build can now be a six-week one.

  8. 3 min read

    What 'production grade' means when AI wrote most of the code

    A checklist we hold ourselves to before anything we build is allowed near real customers, real money, or real data. None of it is new. All of it is easier to skip than it used to be.

  9. 3 min read

    What we saw the first time we used Cursor

    In 2023 we tried a new code editor with GPT-3.5 wired into it. By the end of the afternoon it was clear that the cost of building software had changed, and that a studio built around that fact would have an advantage for a while.

  10. 2 min read

    Why IRLY

    What we knew when we started, how the studio got its name, and the offhand remark from someone who misread it that became the standard we hold ourselves to.