Eric Ries
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Eric Ries. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Eric Ries's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The metric I trust least is the one going up.
That sentence sounds wrong. Everything in my career has trained me to worship the rising line — users, revenue, deployments, features shipped. The dashboard glows green. The team celebrates. The investors nod. The line goes up.
But I have watched lines go up while the thing underneath them was dying. I have shipped products that hit every growth target and solved no human problem. I have confused the feeling of momentum with the reality of progress, and the confusion cost me years.
This is the trap the AI revolution has set for every builder alive. The tools are so powerful, so fast, so generative, that output has become trivial. I can build in a weekend what used to take