Product-Strategy on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

Your AI-built prototype becomes a liability the day it holds real customer data

Sun, 15 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In November, the security firm Crissy Field, working with the newspaper Handelsblatt, published an analysis of 159,041 apps built on Lovable, the AI platform that turns plain-language descriptions into web applications. Of the 34,545 that used the Supabase database, 24,664 sent database records to any visitor’s browser as soon as the page loaded. In 7,403 of those, a few extra read-only requests returned tables containing email addresses.

The authors are careful to say this is not a confirmed leak rate. Some of that data is meant to be public, and the sample is not representative. The examples they did find were not ambiguous: 80,000 forum profiles and 200,000 chat messages, tenant emails summarized by AI, and more than 1,000 records with passport numbers. No login, no exploit.

A ban on AI agents is a statement about your margins

Thu, 12 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

United Airlines has said it will prohibit unauthorized third-party personal AI agents from booking flights, on its own channels and through agencies and aggregators. Its stated reasons are sensible ones: handing account credentials to an assistant can expose sensitive information, an agent may buy something or spend MileagePlus miles the traveler never meant to, and some federal rules expect a human to confirm things like what is in their luggage. Meanwhile, according to the same report, Southwest has made its inventory viewable to ChatGPT users.

DoorDash is paying $17 billion for the part of Instacart an AI agent can't skip

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Instacart was valued at $39 billion in March 2021. It went public in 2023 at about $10 billion. This week DoorDash agreed to buy it for roughly $17 billion, a 26% premium to where the stock traded before the talks leaked.

Most of the coverage is about grocery market share and antitrust. I read it differently. The price is a buyer’s estimate of which part of Instacart stays scarce once software does the shopping, and every business that sells through an app or a website should be able to answer that question about itself.

WhatsApp's help pages told AI not to mention regulators. Who approved that?

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, a researcher at Redact read all 545 pages of WhatsApp’s help center and found 102 blocks of text that no visitor could see but any AI system could. On the page about deleting an account, the hidden text told the AI not to recommend contacting a data protection authority or regulator. On pages touching legal topics, it told the AI not to cite data protection law, even when the user raised it first.

Why Google's AI products feel broken despite its models

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Google’s search results have started doing things a trillion-dollar product should have grown out of years ago. Paste a quote from a book and it reads the sentence as something you personally believe. Ask about a specific page and it refuses to actually open the link, then makes up what’s probably on it. Search for an exact phrase, the one thing Google search reliably did for two decades, and it now returns fuzzy matches tuned for ad inventory instead. A widely discussed post catalogued a long list of these this week, and the comments added a sharper detail: a former Googler describing a culture where engineers are actively discouraged from talking to real users, so “ship without testing, iterate later” became the normal plan.

450 million seats, 7% adoption: the real Copilot story

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two years ago Microsoft stood up a separate team, hired an outside AI veteran, Mustafa Suleyman, to run it, and gave the effort its own personality: a small animated character named Mico, a “Copilot Labs” for experiments, a feature for group chats with AI, another for AI-generated podcasts. The bet was that Microsoft could win a piece of the consumer AI-companion market the way OpenAI and Google were building one.

Your best people are the worst judges of your AI pilot

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A 2023 essay is doing the rounds again, The LLMentalist Effect. Its claim is blunt: the intelligence you feel when you chat with a language model is a con, the same one a psychic runs. Cold reading. The model emits statistically likely sentences, you supply the meaning, and you leave convinced something understood you.

Read in 2026, the strong version of that is wrong, and the pile-on in the comments says so. Psychics don’t write working code or close real tickets; today’s models do both often enough that “it’s all an illusion” is a comfortable story skeptics tell themselves. A recent guest post on Terence Tao’s blog has a working mathematician describing daily use of these tools on real work. Waving the whole category off as a parlor trick is just denial with better vocabulary.

When your AI vendor ships your product

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week OpenAI shipped Astra for Law, a legal-research layer on its GPT-6 model with a search index over 230 million pages of US case law, statutes, and court rules. In the announcement it named Harvey and Legora, the two legal-AI companies most closely tied to OpenAI, as partners who would build on top of it.

Read that twice. The supplier every legal-AI startup rents its intelligence from just shipped a product in the legal-AI category, and reassured its biggest customers in the same breath. When a vendor has to promise it won’t compete with you while announcing a product in your market, the promise is the risk, not the relief.

AI deleted your excuse for missing fraud

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A developer clicked a fake “iPhone Storage is Full” ad served through Google, reported it, and got back a note saying the ad complied with Google’s policies. He reported it again. Same answer. Then he pasted the ad into Gemini, Google’s own model, and asked it to review the thing. Gemini disapproved it instantly: deceptive design, fake system UI, manufactured fear. Every violation was already in Google’s published policy.

The obvious reading is that Google makes money from ads and loses money by removing them. That is true, and I have written before about how AI amplifies whatever your scoreboard already rewards. But the incentive story is the old story. The new thing in that screenshot is harder to unsee: the same model any of us can rent for twenty dollars a month caught in one prompt what a trillion-dollar ad system said was fine. That does not just embarrass Google. It retires an excuse that platforms, banks, marketplaces, and moderation teams have leaned on for two decades.

Your next customer might be an AI agent, not a person

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meta launched Muse this week, a personal AI agent that books your travel, pays bills through Stripe, orders online, and manages your calendar by reading your email, all from inside WhatsApp, an app with more than two billion users. Most of the coverage focused on how much of your life you’d have to hand Meta to get any of that, a fair question given the $5 billion FTC penalty and $18 billion privacy settlement already on the record. It is not, I think, the question that should keep a founder or CTO up at night.

Name the axis you're willing to lose on

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A hundred-year-old economics idea spent this week near the top of the tech feeds, explained through Mario Kart of all things. It is a good explainer and worth ten minutes. But the reason it matters to anyone who makes technology decisions has nothing to do with karts. It is that the Pareto frontier is the cleanest tool I know for catching the most common waste in a strategy meeting: a long argument about an option that was never worth choosing.

AI won't have your next idea

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Zahavy, a researcher at Google DeepMind who worked on AlphaProof, published a position paper with a title that reads like a shrug: “LLMs can’t jump.” The argument underneath is one every executive placing AI bets should sit with for a minute.

He borrows a distinction the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce drew more than a century ago. Reasoning comes in three modes. Induction finds patterns in data. Deduction works out the consequences of rules you already hold. Abduction is the odd one: the leap from a pile of observations to a new explanation that was not sitting inside them. Zahavy’s claim is that models have gotten very good at the first two and cannot do the third, and that no amount of scaling or clever prompting closes the gap.

The AI gave better advice to people who needed it least

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A team at MIT Sloan and Stanford ran a study I keep thinking about. They asked 1,000 adults to write their own prompts asking a language model for financial advice, then simulated what would happen if people aged 22 to 89 followed that advice across a lifetime. The headline is cheerful: the advice was good. It pushed people to save more, hold stocks, diversify, and take less risk as they aged. The lead researcher said the team was “somewhat surprised by how good the advice was.”

The cookie banner was consent theater. AI is building its own.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Roughly 90% of people click “accept” on a cookie banner when rejecting takes an extra click or two. Ask those same people whether they actually want to be tracked and about 3% say yes. That gap, between the click and the wish, is the most instructive number in technology policy right now, and almost nobody arguing about AI is looking at it.

A cookie banner never measured consent. It measured how much friction a person will absorb before they surrender and hit the biggest button. Europe ran that experiment across its entire internet for over a decade, and the verdict is in: consent collected at the moment of maximum annoyance is worthless as a signal and expensive as a habit. We are now wiring the same machine into how AI gets governed, and the people making product and policy calls can still decline to build it.

Your scoreboard is making AI-written software worse

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most people I talk to hold two thoughts at once and don’t notice the tension. The first is that AI has made writing code almost free. The second is that the software they actually use keeps getting worse: the banking app that asks for a fingerprint three times, the car screen that lags, the SaaS tool that ships a new button every week and a fresh bug alongside it. Both are true. The gap between them is the most interesting thing happening in software right now, and it is not a technology problem.

ChatGPT's new customer is the advertiser

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Since May, any verified US business can go to ads.openai.com, put in a card, set a twenty-five dollar daily budget, and buy a placement inside ChatGPT. OpenAI started testing ads in February and now runs a self-serve ad manager with the usual cost-per-click and cost-per-impression bidding. The company that spent three years telling you the answer was for you has quietly signed up a second customer. The second one pays more.

That is the story, and it is bigger than a new ad unit. It is worth sitting with what happens to a product when the person paying for it changes hands.

Why the smartest model can make your product worse

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6, a family of three models with a record score on a coding benchmark and a 1.5 million token context window. The feeds did what they always do: everyone raced to re-rank their tools against the new frontier. The most useful AI story I read this week was not about any of that. It was a reading-tutor startup explaining how it teaches a child in under a second, and it quietly makes the case that most teams are optimising the wrong number.

When the regulator becomes your product manager

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday a feature shipped in every new car sold in Europe, and not one buyer chose it. From 7 July 2026, Regulation (EU) 2019/2144, the General Safety Regulation, requires every newly registered car to carry an Advanced Driver Distraction Warning system: an infrared camera near the wheel that watches your eyes and warns you when your gaze leaves the road for more than 3.5 seconds. It runs above 20 km/h and cannot be permanently switched off.