Killing ProfileScribe's broad platform bet, and the judgment lesson behind it
Abstracts
Abstracts
I published a postmortem on ProfileScribe, laying out why I'm killing the automated professional network version of the idea. The scope grew into a full platform — profile pages, agent avatars, automated timelines — before I'd nailed down one specific job worth automating, and that made it hard to compete with tools built for a single purpose. The lesson I took from it: the hard part of an AI product isn't calling out to a language service, it's the surrounding system that turns raw activity into something a person would actually trust reading.
That same distinction shows up in 'The workflow is free. Judgment is not.', which argues that GTM engineering keeps expanding precisely because building a workflow got cheap while deciding what should exist — the actual commercial judgment — didn't. Killing ProfileScribe's broader ambitions was that kind of judgment call: easier to wire up more automation than to admit the wrapper wasn't earning its place next to specialized tools.
I also wrote up 'Grok for the browser. Codex for the repository.', a smaller but related point — pick the tool that matches where the work actually happens, browser context versus repository context, rather than forcing one tool to do both. It's the same discipline running through all three posts: match the system to the specific job instead of building broad and hoping it fits.