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Comment by tanelpoder | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the grand vision was to later use all those newly built internal tools as reusable components in their customer-facing apps…

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Yeah, I feel like if their goal was to make custom software cheap and easy, this was basically just dogfooding.

I would assume they were collecting data. If you're building a chatbot to talk to clients, you need all the transcripts from meetings, chat logs, project info, analytics, metrics, and so on. It's the only way to train your model properly.

Do they have any patents related to using chatbots for project management?

Probably, but casting such a wide net so early has its risks - as is visible in hindsight. Build one, then use that to build the second, the first two to build the third, etc, etc.

Doing everything all at once is a recipe for disaster.

Most likely. But that's exactly what someone who hasn't experienced enough cycles in industry would come up with :).

Exactly this. My startup count is zero, but even I’m well enough informed to know that casting such a wide net is diverting attention away into too many tangents, too quickly, and will drain your balance sheet dry before you can capitalize on any singular success to build a moat or secure another funding round.

They were banking on AI coding being better than it was, and the snowball effect happening faster than it ever could. And now, they’re toast.

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