Zhang Pinpin · Hands-On AI Coach
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My product grew itself — I just tap confirm on my phone

Long-Form Video · EP0082 August 21, 2026 02:03
What this episode covers

If you're a boss using AI, whatever you do, don't get yourself a WorkBuddy. As a manager, I don't even work — so what do I need a buddy for? My day job is to observe, judge and decide. I don't need to do the delivery work, and most days I don't even open my laptop. Even if I genuinely wanted to build a product or run a dev team, there are better tools and better ways.

Most of my commercial products these days are self-iterating. What does that mean? I'm not open-sourcing them so other people write my code — I open up a feedback panel for my users. Almost all my users are enterprise clients or professional consumer users, and they're the only ones who know what they actually want.

If you’re a boss using AI, whatever you do, don’t get yourself a WorkBuddy. As a manager, I don’t even work — so what do I need a buddy for? My day job is to observe, judge and decide. I don’t need to do the delivery work, and most days I don’t even open my laptop. Even if I genuinely wanted to build a product or run a dev team, there are better tools and better ways.

Most of my commercial products these days are self-iterating. What does that mean? I’m not open-sourcing them so other people write my code — I open up a feedback panel for my users. Almost all my users are enterprise clients or professional consumer users, and they’re the only ones who know what they actually want.

Here’s the mechanism I built. When a user submits feedback through the panel, my Claude Code parses the request automatically and makes a call against my roadmap and my value ranking: should this be built, why, and how. If it decides yes, it writes the code — but it does not ship. When I open my phone, I see them queued up one by one, each waiting for approval with a detailed report attached. I tap confirm, and the feature hot-ships. It then replies to the user who raised it: thanks for the feedback, in this version, because of what you reported, we shipped this update.

So the whole product grew itself. I didn’t plan it out. Go look at the changelog — the cloud version of Claude Code that I built shipped 642 updates in 33 days.

Beyond user feedback, the AI runs a daily patrol: using the analytics events instrumented across the platform, it looks at what problems users hit and files its own suggestions on what needs adjusting and how. So those 600-plus updates weren’t me grinding out code alone — it’s the AI, my users and me feeding this product together. And along the way, users grow more dependent on the platform, and fonder of it.

Of course, as a manager I don’t only run product development. I also run everything else in the company — sales, finance, legal, knowledge management. Those all live in other systems, and I’ll probably cover them in a later video.

Same as always: if you’d rather spend time to save money, follow my account. If your time is genuinely expensive and you’d rather spend money to save time, come talk to me directly.

The whole product grew itself. I didn't plan it out.