JournalHo Chi Minh City
Notes from
the build.
Product decisions with the evidence attached, notes on running AI agents inside a real product, and the occasional piece of infrastructure I could not leave alone.
- Pieces
- Five
- Written
- Jul 2026
- Longest read
- 4 min
- Comments
- By email
- 01 Activation is a design problem What actually moved new-trial activation from 4% to 30%, in the order it happened, including the two experiments that did nothing.
- 02 The PM who reads the diff Reading code is not a party trick for product managers. It changes which arguments you are able to have, and how early.
- 03 A wiki your agent maintains Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern applied to product work: supersession, privacy tiers, and why RAG never made my knowledge compound.
- 04 Weekly releases as a management tool Cadence is not a delivery detail. It decides how much you are allowed to be wrong, and how fast the team finds out.
- 05 Homelab as production WireGuard mesh, self-hosted DNS, containers on two continents, and the discipline of building something you refuse to babysit.