Yes, you can now build an inbox in an afternoon. Congratulations, you are now responsible for: - Deliverability. - Bounce management. - SPF, DKIM, DMARC. - A domain that slowly drifts into spam. - Finding out it why the hell it's drifting into spam?! - Parsing emails from a mail server last updated in 2007 - HTML, plain text, and emails somehow containing neither. - Outlook’s interpretation of HTML. - Outlook’s other interpretation of HTML. - Threading that breaks when someone changes the subject. - Someone starting a new conversation by replying to an email from 2022. - Forwards inside forwards inside forwards. - CC, BCC, reply-all, and someone who really shouldn’t have clicked reply-all. - Attachments. - Attachments with malware.. - Inline images that become attachments. - Attachments that were supposed to be inline images. - A company logo attached to every reply, forever. - Quoted replies. - Distinguishing a quoted reply from the actual reply. - Someone answering your five questions inside the quoted reply. - Signatures longer than the conversation. - The out-of-office that answers your out-of-office. - Two autoresponders having a productive weekend together. - Notifications that fire twice. - Notifications that never fire. - A reply sent from the notification itself. - A reply to a notification about an internal note. - Making absolutely sure that notes stays internal. - Permissions. - Two teammates writing the same reply. - Drafts that sync across devices. - Drafts that overwrite other drafts across devices. - A confidently displayed “Saved” that was optimistic. - Snoozed conversations. - Time zones (!) - Daylight saving time (!!) - A conversation snoozed until a time that technically doesn’t exist. - One customer showing up as three people across email, chat, and Slack. - Three different people sharing one email address. - Merging them. - Undoing the merge. - Search. - Search that finds the thing you can literally see on screen. - Webhooks arriving twice. - Webhooks arriving out of order. - Webhooks not arriving. - Retrying a failed send without sending the customer six apologies. - Rate limits you discover during your first traffic spike. - Training your AI on your product. - Scraping your website. - Scraping the pages that need JavaScript. - Not scraping your entire website footer into every answer. - PDFs. - PDFs that are actually pictures of PDFs. - Keeping the content fresh. - Knowing when content changed. - Knowing when content disappeared. - Making the AI forget the pricing page from last year. - Conflicting answers across your docs, website, and past replies. - Deciding which one wins. - Chunking. - Embeddings. - Reindexing everything when you change embedding models. - Retrieval that finds the answer, not just something with similar words. - Web search tooling. - Knowing when to search. - Prompt injection hiding in a page you just scraped. - An agent confidently promising a feature you don’t have. - An agent confidently issuing a refund it shouldn’t. - Tool permissions. - Tool timeouts. - Tool retries that issue the refund twice. - Knowing when to hand off to a human. - Actually handing off to a human. - Not continuing to argue after handing off to a human. - Evaluating whether any of this works. - Evaluating it again after a model update. - Token budgets. - Context windows. - A customer pasting an entire novel into the chat. - WebSockets. - WebSocket authentication. - Reconnecting WebSockets. - Reconnecting 10,000 WebSockets at once after a restart. - A connection that looks alive but isn’t. - A phone switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data mid-message. - Messages that arrive once. - Messages that arrive in order. - Messages that arrive. - Syncing read states. - Unread badges. - Typing indicators that stop typing eventually. - A customer opening your widget in six tabs. - Anonymous users becoming logged-in users. - Logged-in users logging out on a shared computer. - The iPhone keyboard covering the message composer. - Safari. - Keyboard navigation. - A widget that must not slow down the actual product. - Explaining that “sent” and “delivered” are different things. - A help center. - An editor. - An editor that survives pasting from Google Docs. - Images. - Image resizing. - Broken images. - Article drafts. - Autosave. - Version history. - Restoring the version before someone deleted half the article. - Reordering nested categories without losing an afternoon. - Slugs. - 301 Redirects when slugs change. - Internal links that now point nowhere. - Working out which translations need updating after an edit. - Search that understands what customers mean. - Custom domains. - DNS verification. - SSL certificates. - Renewing SSL certificates. - Someone putting Cloudflare in front of your Cloudflare. - Mobile layouts. - Dark mode. - Code blocks. - Tables on small screens. - Sitemaps. - Canonical URLs. - Accidentally indexing draft content. - Accidentally deindexing published content. - Cache invalidation. - “I published it. Why does it still show the old version?” - Making sure your AI sees the new version too. - Spam. - Phishing. - Someone uploading malware as “a screenshot of the issue.” - Someone pasting their CC details into chat. - Someone asking you to delete every trace of that CC. - Logs that also contain the CC. - Backups that also contain the CC. - Backups. - Restoring backups. - Discovering those are two separate features. - An expired token. - A background job that quietly stopped on Thursday. - “Disk is full.” Sunday. 3 a.m. - Monitoring all of this. - Monitoring the monitoring. Now you have two jobs 🤷‍♂️

✍️ Writing is essential to how @Mercury communicates as a 1300 person remote-first company. I wrote on Writing At Mercury (inspired by @vxanand's post). Principles of Writing at Mercury 1. Writing is thinking: Spending time on writing is not wasting time, it helps you process ideas, analyze problems, and explore solutions. 2. Less writing is better: Good writing is concise, which makes it easier to understand. 3. Reading should be easy: If >2 people will read your writing you should spend extra time making your writing good + digestible + clear etc. It is not fair for people reading to do work that the writer could have done for them. 4. Writing is expression: Your writing will be taken as an expression of your identity, so give it the care it deserves and be authentic. 5. Writing is important: Writing is the main way we communicate internally at Mercury, as a remote-first firm. We frame important discussions, and document thought processes and ultimate decisions, with our writing. On Using AI for Writing It is very easy to use AI to write a lot of content. If you do so, then by default you have: 1. Outsourced your thinking 2. Created a verbose/long doc 3. Made it hard to read 4. Have a doc that is not expressive and very bland 5. Watered down our discussions and decision making In other words, heavy AI use for writing is diametrically opposed to the principles of writing laid out above. Some effective ways that AI could be used instead: 1. Critiquing your writing 2. Condensing your writing 3. Shaping initial drafts 4. Summarizing complex information On Using AI to Respond on Slack/Comments Slack threads and comments are a particularly bad use of AI writing. 1. Slack responses and doc comments should always be short. Large blocks of AI text don’t belong. 2. AI used here is often thoughtless and the other party could have just used the AI tool themself. It inherently shows a disrespect for the reader’s time. 3. Given our remote culture, one of the main ways we connect with each other is via Slack. Using AI often would obscure your authentic perspective. 4. It would be better to share the prompt you gave to the AI directly to the other person and they can just prompt their own AI tool. How to do Great Writing at Mercury We aren’t going to police whether someone is using AI or not to help them write. We will just have a high standard for your writing output. Here are some high-level rules that should help: 1. Always read and stand by 100% of your written output. 2. When it is important, spend time on your writing. You might spend time on the narrative arc, the tone, the structure, whether it clearly articulates an issue, explores solutions, and drives toward an outcome. 3. Think hard about how you can use fewer words and be more concise. 4. Be authentic. You don’t need to dress up your writing in corporate jargon to make it sound professional. Simple, plain writing is often more effective. 5. Never copy-paste AI responses to someone in Slack or to comment on a doc. 6. Sometimes it's better to write nothing at all. Don’t make a comment in a doc/slack because you want to be part of the convo, say it if it materially moves things forward.

We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay. Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this. Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide. Here are the four guiding principles: 1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it. 2. Writing is thinking Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter. 3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to. 4. Longer is not better AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt. You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)