Sidharth S. 🚀

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

Lovable just got called out for not paying VAT in Europe yet. Many came to our defense saying the EU isn't built for hypergrowth startups. I appreciate it, but that's not my takeaway. We can build a generational company from Europe, and I want to prove it. I'm not asking Europe to stop being Europe. I don’t know the perfect solution, but there are advantages to a high trust society and systems that don't bankrupt people when they get sick. Lovable WILL – and has always planned to – be compliant and pay any fees from being late. We pay our taxes and hope to pay billions more in taxes over the years to come. Building from Europe is a bet I'm proud of.

What was preventing non-technical people from building was not the lack of model intelligence; the intelligence is already there. The actual barrier is the "plumbing" part: setting up environment, connecting to APIs, installing libraries, deploying... Gemini felt magical because many of Google's services are BUILT-IN: LLM chat, image gen, video gen, voice recognition, text-to-speech, live voice chat, Google search, Google Maps... When I tried to build stuff 6 months ago, connecting to these APIs was what tripped me up the most. Now I can just literally tell the AI what I want, and it's done. I don't care about the coding benchmarks; just solve the plumbing!!

Day 80: almost didn’t record today, because I don’t have much interesting progress to share, but doing this for future me I will make it through this boring lull and keep going

7. Your acquisition channel > your product This is a harsh truth, truly difficult to handle: usually, the best product don't win. The one with the better acquisition channel does. If you have no plan, no strategy to put your product in front of people's eyes, you won't succeed. It can be anything: a youtube channel, a social media account, SEO, ads, partnerships, affiliates, your network, a company, another product... Think about it before building anything: how are you going to sell it?

Day 51: too early for SEO. So it seems it’s time to get back to building, so I have something to market and build in public. But need to learn how to build faster so I have time to market. Back is still hurting, but much better than yesterday. Hopefully back to normal tmr

Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.