The people still using what I'm moving on from
Two daily Vinci users keep returning to a product while I think about the company's next direction. What do I owe the people who stayed?
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Candid accounts of building, closing and rebuilding companies. Decisions, mistakes and changing beliefs, alongside essays on ownership and technological change.
George Pu
Founder of SimpleDirect, an independent Canadian AI lab.
71 matching essays in georges-takes. Clear filters
I forgot how unusual my AI use had become
My work now depends on AI in ways I had stopped noticing. My parents and a friend reminded me how different the same technology can feel.
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I'm Afraid to Take a Vacation
I own the compute. Right now, it owns my calendar.
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My Coding Agent Shouldn't Have a Boss
Claude Code is one of the best products I use. That is exactly why realizing how little of it I controlled became uncomfortable.
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The parts of AI I could no longer delegate
I started an AI lab before I was capable of supervising model training myself. Then a bigger training run didn't work, and the gap stopped being ignorable.
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I am not afraid of failure. I am afraid of becoming irrelevant.
Failure feels survivable. The harder fear is spending an important period in history building something that doesn't matter - and not knowing whether that fear comes from purpose or ego.
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I have stopped knowing what a productive day feels like
AI made our small team faster than any team I've run before. It also destroyed the old relationship between effort, output, and satisfaction.
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The company is moving faster than I am
Vinci didn't exist 30 days ago. The company has already changed shape several times. I'm not sure I've processed any of it.
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30 Days, Six Products, Two Dead Models, and the Part That Didn't Work
On July 9 we shipped a model my engineering lead trained. On July 12 I took it off the product. Six products in 30 days is the headline. That decision is the story.
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What a 3-Person Team Actually Pays for AI: July 2026
In the first week of July I spent over $5,000 coding through one company's API and couldn't tell you what I got for it. Here's what we actually pay now - the receipts, the line that shouldn't have existed, and the one number I'm holding back.
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The Day I killed our product strategy
Today (on a Sunday) I took our own AI models off our own app and replaced them with a competitor's model. This is the story of how the decision happened in 24 hours, what it was like in the 4 days leading up to it, what it cost me to see it, and what I think other founders can take from it. Day 1 - my own product told me the truth We're an AI model company. Or we were. We spent months training small open-weight models for honesty - models that say 'I don't know' instead of inventing answers
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Six Months After My Post-AI Manifesto - A Reflection
Six months ago I posted the Post-AI Manifesto - five layers to stay ahead of AI. Here's what happened to each one, and the single line that captures the whole difference.
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