Notes on getting work done by agents
Comparisons, prices as of this month, and what actually works when you hand a task to an AI agent. Written by the people who build and test them.
Weekly Retro: Week 1 of Building Gravity (Tools, Decisions, Problems, Week 2 Changes)
Week 1 of Gravity is in the books. This is the tactical retrospective, written in the format I plan to use weekly: what shipped, what tools settled in, what decisions got made, what problems hit, week-1 metrics, and…
The 3X-Bigger-Than-the-Feature-X Rule (And Why 1.3X Always Loses)
The 10x rule from Zero to One applies at the product level: the whole product needs to be 10x better than the closest alternative for users to switch (Volt Equity, Thiel 10x rule). It is well-known and widely cited.…
The Mistakes I Made With Super AI: A Founder's Decision Postmortem
The public version of the Super AI postmortem is on this site already (read it here). It explains the structural failure: an all-in-one AI router built in 2024, killed in March 2025, in a category that was getting…
The Mental Health Platform I Wish I Built Differently
From October 2022 to October 2023, I built MindWave out of Pune. Mental health, private sharing, support, journaling, group therapy on the roadmap, free professional community next to it. The product worked in the…
The Day I Decided to Shut Down: Three Shutdowns, Three Decision Moments
People ask what the day looks like, the day a founder decides to shut down. The truthful answer is: it does not look like a day. It looks like weeks of rationalisation followed by a small moment that finally tips the…
How I Pick What to Build Next: A Founder's Selection Methodology After Three Failures
After three shutdowns, idea selection is no longer a creative act. It is a structured one. The cost of starting the wrong thing is now measured in years, not in weeks of energy. The rubric below is what I now run…
Building in Bangalore, Not SF: Geography and Cost After Three Shutdowns
Aryan Agarwal, building Gravity, from Bangalore. The default assumption when a 3x founder builds an AI agent platform is San Francisco. The default assumption is wrong for this company; it is also probably wrong for…
Why I'm Betting Against Workflow Platforms in 2026 (Timing Argument)
This is a timing post, not a thesis post. The thesis lives in describe outcome, not workflow,workflow editors are the wrong abstraction once intelligence has moved into the system. This post is the narrower question:…
Vibe AI Postmortem: Lessons from Building an "AI Friend"
Vibe AI was an AI friend. From March 2025 to February 2026, I built it, ran it, watched it work in week one, watched it stop working by week three, and then watched the unit economics confirm what week three had…
The Three Checks I Missed: 10x Value, Scaling, and Sustainable Margins
Three startups, three shutdowns, three different missing checks. After the third one I realised the same framework would have killed every bad bet before it cost a year. This is the framework. None of the three…
Super AI Postmortem: Why an All-in-One AI App Didn't Work in 2024
Super AI ran from March 2024 to March 2025. Twelve months. The pitch fit on a sticker: describe what you want, we'll pick the model. An all-in-one AI app that auto-routed each prompt to the best foundation model, GPT…
Month 1: Building Gravity in Public, What Shipped, What Didn't
This is month 1 of Gravity, in public. Public means: I write the retro before I have all the answers, name what shipped and what didn't, and let the kill thresholds I set at month start judge themselves. The point is…
Mental Health Platform Postmortem: Why MindWave Shut Down After 13 Months
From October 2022 to October 2023 I ran a mental health startup out of Pune called MindWave. Thirteen months. The core product, private sharing, journaling, and venting, shipped. Real users came. Real users came…
How We Run 80+ Tests Per AI Agent Capability (and Why)
Every Gravity capability ships through 80+ tests across 8 failure categories before it goes near a real user. Not because we love testing, because AI agents are non-deterministic, and "it worked once" is not a…
The Economics of Bootstrapped AI Agent Companies (Unit-Level Math)
The economics of an AI agent company come down to one equation: per-active-agent revenue minus per-active-agent cost-of-inference. If the result is positive, the company can self-fund. If it's negative, no amount of…
Describe Outcome, Not Workflow: The Case Against Zapier-Style Automation
Zapier was the right abstraction for the 2010s. Trigger, step, action, condition, branch. A multi-billion-dollar business on the premise that the user could design the path. The premise is no longer right. The…
Bootstrapping an AI Agent Platform in 2026: A Founder's Playbook
Three shutdowns ago, I'd have raised a seed round to build Gravity. After three shutdowns, the framework I came back to is bootstrap. Not because raising is wrong, it's the right move for plenty of founders, but…
Three Startups, Three Shutdowns: What I Learned Before Building Gravity AI
In early 2026, 40% of AI startups launched in 2024 had already shut down (TechStartups, AI shutdowns roundup, December 2025). I'd already been in three of those statistics, just a year or two earlier than the cohort.…