11/10/2026
In our lead up to our anniversary, I thought we’d take a pause on our usual Kitchen notes and product features and spend a little bit more time sharing my reflections.
I read somewhere that the problem sometimes with setting goals and such is that when you achieve them, it ends up feeling like, oh great, so now what? And the goal post will keep shifting and happiness feels forever elusive. And so I think even though this is a silly social media trend, that it’s worth to take the time to look back and appreciate for a hot minute how far we’ve come. Of course the work still feels hard. Of course we are still trying to make rent. Of course we are still firefighting. But objectively, I think the fires we are fighting are a lot bigger now.
(Swipe for multiple captions>)
Everyone wants to skip the work. They want to find a better, smarter way to make money. Agentic AI is going to change how products build, right? Or GenAI is going to ruin all of us because what used to take years will now take months or days. And I’m very pro AI, really, and I think great, if AI is going to make us way more productive, sure. You all know by now that I love efficiency. But the question posed by one of my lecturers is this, right. What are you doing with all that time you are saving? It’s the same with the FIRE stuff, right? You want to be financially independent and retire early. Ok, retire early and do what? At 40 years old, you want to retire and spend the next 50 years of your life doing what? And I think if you don’t have a good answer for this then you may be in trouble. But that’s just what I think, and what do I know? I thought I was wise at 20, now I look back and think I was wildly naive.
Anyway, I know if I put a prompt into ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or whatever it can build me a web store in a matter of minutes. Fong slogged over our website revamp for months, and prior to that, we spent countless hours (and still do!) trying to figure out how to get our Shopify to work the way we want it to. But that’s part of it, right? Part of it is actually having to sit there to figure it out. To write the product caption, and write the “about us” and write the philosophy and a
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