Reading up on PostHog
14 deep · digging since jan 28
- How much can you delegate to agents? - by Jina Yoon
The article presents a practical framework for deciding how much autonomy to grant AI agents based on task checkability and undo cost, outlining four levels from assistant to self‑driving mode.
- Stop being the code review bottleneck - by Jina Yoon
Engineers can offload AI‑generated code review to agent pipelines, using multiple specialized reviewers and automated triage to reduce human bottlenecks.
- Autoresearch, Claude and Constrained Optimization
An experiment using Claude Code to autonomously optimize a file compression algorithm over 10 iterations, achieving competitive results against standard tools by iterating on an LZSS-based approach.
- I rewrote PostHog's SQL parser, 70x faster, while barely looking at the code
PostHog's engineer used parallel Claude Code sessions to rewrite their SQL parser, achieving a 70x speedup by fuzzing against the old ANTLR-based parser as an oracle.
- I wrote a 70x faster SQL parser while barely looking at the code - PostHog
The author used AI agents to rewrite PostHog's SQL parser in Rust, achieving a 70x speedup (454x in production) via property-based testing and oracle-based development.
- Why we're bullish on loops - by Ian Vanagas
Loops—self-prompting agents that autonomously complete long-running tasks using context and verification—are becoming viable due to model improvements and enable self-driving products.
- Karpathy's Autoresearch found a 3-year-old bug in our query engine (and improved performance by 11%) - PostHog
PostHog used a Karpathy-style AI agent to find a 3-year-old ClickHouse bug where `toTimeZone()` disabled primary key usage, and the fix cut query time by 37%
- PostHog Code
PostHog Code uses production data signals to automatically diagnose issues and generate pull requests before users know there's a problem.
- What we wish we knew about building AI agents
PostHog shares lessons from two years building AI agents, urging teams to validate demand with simpler interfaces like MCP servers before committing to custom agents.
- The hidden danger of shipping fast - by Cleo
PostHog argues that rapid product velocity creates an adoption bottleneck where user attention, not shipping capacity, becomes the limiting factor, and offers strategies to balance both.
- Claude Code made me love meetings again
AI coding tools like Claude Code reduce the need for deep flow states, freeing mental capacity to enjoy spontaneous meetings and interruptions.
Takes
Running list of AI agent ideas to make you more productive and more money: 1. The onboarding rescue agent. Watch PostHog for any new signup who stalls on the same step for more than 10 minutes, then have an agent send them a Loom style personal message or a CustomerIO email that answers the exact thing they're stuck on before they give up. 2. The pricing page bounce agent. Fire a PostHog webhook when someone hits your pricing page twice and leaves, have the agent enrich them with Apollo, and send a short email with the objection handler for their specific company size when it matters. 3. The second product in support agent. Point an agent at your Intercom/Plain inbox etc and have it tag every request that isn't actually about your product, the adjacent thing people assume you also do. It ranks them by frequency. 3. The you already answered this agent. Have an agent read your sent folder, your Intercom replies, and your sales emails, and pull the clearest explanations you've ever written about your product. It drops them into a swipe file your landing page and cold emails pull from. 4. The internal tool to product agent. Point an agent at your team's GitHub scripts, Retool apps, and Google Sheets, and have it flag the ones 10 other companies in your niche would pay for. 5. The review mining agent. Apify scrape every review of your top 3 competitors on G2 and Capterra, cluster the 1-star complaints with Claude, and get a ranked list of the features to build and the exact words to use in ads to poach those unhappy customers. 6. The sell what you give away agent. Once a week, feed your Granola/Gmeet call notes and Intercom threads into an agent that hunts for every task your team did for free that took more than 30 minutes. It clusters them, counts how often each came up, and ranks by demand. The top 3 become paid add ons. 7. The win pattern cloner. Pull your last 50 closed-won deals from HubSpot or whatever CRM you use, have an agent find the firmographic traits and the trigger event those buyers shared before they bought, build a lookalike list in Clay, and feed it straight into Instantly. 8. The self improving ad agent. Wire an agent to your Meta ads account that pulls the winners daily, uses Perplexity to scrape fresh Reddit pain points, generates new static creative with Nano Banana, checks it against your brand guide with a vision model, publishes, kills the losers, and scales the winners on a loop. An entire performance marketer running 24/7. 9. The first hour agent. Pull your last 500 signups from PostHog, split them into power users and churned users, and have the agent diff the first session event streams to find the one action power users took that churners skipped. Then force that action into onboarding with a PostHog feature flag. 10. The lost deal rescue agent. Have an agent pull your closed lost deals from your CRM, then monitor those competitors' status pages and pricing pages with a daily Firecrawl. The morning a competitor has an outage or raises prices, it drafts a personal reach out to the buyers you lost to them. 11. The Gemini video scout. Point Gemini at your competitors' YouTube demos, webinars, and conference talks, and have it watch the actual footage, not the transcript, to pull the features they're teasing and the UI they're showing. It reads what they demo on screen, not just what they write down. 12. The wrong answer agent. Run your product's top buyer questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity every week on a cron, and have the agent log the moment any of them start saying something false about your pricing, features, or positioning, then Slack you the exact wrong claim and the source it likely pulled from. Honestly the fun part is that once you build one of these, you can't stop seeing them everywhere, every manual task starts looking like an agent you haven't set up yet. That's kind of where my head is at lately, so I'll keep dropping agent ideas here and on @startupideaspod as I go, and if you build one that rips, tell me, I want to see it. Grab whatever idea is useful. I'm rooting for you.
@gregisenberg
This is the most exciting time in history to be a solopreneur: - Claude Code to build - Stripe to monetize - Fastlane to market - Posthog to understand usage This is insane 👇
@gauravsbuilding
PostHog's next chapter
@james406