Echo AI

Jensen Huang: AI is going to make poorly defined work much more valuable. Because that’s all humans will do. AI will handle everything else. So what is poorly defined work, and how do you get good at it? Defined work means given these inputs, produce this output. Write code that does X. Summarize this document. Calculate this metric. The goal is specified. The constraints are known. The evaluation criteria exist before you start. Poorly defined work means should we even build this feature? What market should we enter next? Is this candidate going to work out? Which of these three strategic directions is least wrong? There’s no right answer you can verify. There’s only judgment. AI is going to get freakishly good at defined work. Give Claude a spec and it’ll execute. Give GPT a rubric and it’ll score. The skill of translating well-defined problems into solutions is getting automated at 10x speed every 18 months. But AI can’t tell you what problem to solve in the first place. It can generate 50 options. It can’t tell you which one matters. That requires something AI fundamentally lacks: skin in the game. Stakes. Consequences you actually have to live with. So how do you get good at poorly defined work? You make irreversible decisions faster than feels comfortable. The skill is pattern recognition built through reps. You can’t build judgment by thinking about decisions. You build it by making them and eating the outcomes. You get comfortable with “I don’t know yet” and commit anyway. Defined work has the comfort of eventual correctness. Poorly defined work means moving while uncertain. The people who thrive here tolerate that discomfort instead of seeking premature closure. You build taste through volume. Taste is internalized judgment from thousands of micro-decisions. The designer who can feel when something is off made 10,000 design choices before. The PM who senses a bad roadmap decision lived through 100 launches. You seek roles where you own outcomes, not tasks. Task ownership is defined work. Outcome ownership forces you into the undefined space constantly. You can’t own revenue without deciding which features matter. The uncomfortable truth: most people’s entire careers have been defined work dressed up as judgment. They executed someone else’s strategy. They optimized someone else’s metrics. They never had to decide which metrics mattered. That’s about to become visible. Fast.

Jensen Huang told a Cambridge Union "Intelligence is about to be a commodity" For a long time, school and hiring treated “smart” as scarce, because fast recall and clean problem solving were hard to scale beyond the best individuals. AI has flipped that. Jensen explained “When AI takes over all standardized work, the only value humans have left is to handle the poorly defined work.” “The poorly defined work is the most valuable of all work.” - Defined Work (AI Territory) - Poorly Defined Work (Human Territory)

mintlify has got to be the luckiest company I have ever seen in my entire life >ships markdown first docs just as LLMs cause an explosion in developer products >gets into YC, and turns out most of the batch needs docs >wait, other YC companies also need docs >other doc products are built for C-suite and are unusable for scrappy fast-moving developers >other docs products couldn’t grow past a point so there’s not a lot of scrappy competition. the industry looks dead and non-venture scale. >Agents are a thing, and turns out having docs in your codebase is no longer a good-to-have DX thing, but a necessary 10x unlock >searching docs is hard, so Mintlify acquihires the entire Trieve team (that previously built the fastest end-to-end RAG product in Rust. I was thinking about joining Trieve at some point bc I was so impressed by it when I was working at a vector db) >now Mintlify has the best search of any docs product by far >search quickly drives revenue as companies are willing to pay good money to have effective chatbots in their docs >turns out docs have a crazy k-factor, because developers actually see and spend a long time on docs. Mintlify doesn’t even need to parade their logo—their customers are selling their product for them! >refocuses on UI/UX/Latency and now security >but eventually that early bet that let them succeed became a limiting factor. SOMETIMES I WANT A FUKIN EDITOR THAT SYNCS WITH GITHUB >Mintlify builds a world-class editor for docs, and also agents for docs >at this point fast growing AI startups have noticed mintlify and are migrating like crazy >big legacy enterprises carefully eyeing these AI cos start migrating too. mostly INBOUND?????? Yes there’s a lot of truly world-class execution here, but lots of truly lucky bets tbh at ended up going insanely well for them. Mintlify is 2-3 good decisions from being a decacorn. I wouldn’t bet against the Hidden Leaf of YC