Flow State #3 - Doomprompting, Containerisation and AI Haggling
getting stuck in prompting doom loops and creating fun product experiences
Welcome to Edition 3 of Superfluid: Flow State where I curate the smartest takes on startups, AI, and capital allocation from the 75+ articles I read every week. I’ll give you the key insight from 3 of the best pieces that I consumed over the last week that you can immediately apply to your business (in <2 minutes).
Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you thought of this week’s article. I respond to every email.
Today's word count: 577
Read time: 2 min 42 sec.
AI will not make you rich (disclaimer: long article)
In this article, Jerry Neumann (a legendary ex-VC) makes the analogy that the current AI market closely resembles the shipping containerisation wave more than the consumer PC market where everyone can see the obvious benefits, but immediate competition prevents moat-building. (It’s worth reading the article if you want to go deeper into the analogy)
His view is that we’re investing in the wrong layer and should be focused on AI returns that will flow to businesses that leverage productivity gains strategically, e.g., IKEA or Walmart leveraging containerisation to streamline operations and build new retail business models.
I’ve explored this in a few prior articles and it’s similar in thinking to the growing AI-enabled rollup strategy pioneered by Thrive, Slow Ventures and a few others.
As an aside, I’m working with a few companies on this at the moment, and keen to work with more around narrative formation, product and fundraising. Feel free reply to this email or book in some time here to chat!
nails something I've been feeling but couldn't quite articulate: doomprompting as the new doomscrolling. We think we're being productive having conversations with AI, but we're actually outsourcing our thinking while feeling clever about it.I've been helping friends write more, and where the big barrier used to be writer's block, it’s now getting stuck in a doom loop of prompting. Despite having genuinely strong ideas, their first instinct is to funnel everything through AI and tweak with clever prompts. In the end, the output is soulless, incoherent and stripped of their voice.
AI works great for brainstorming and pressure-testing ideas, but fails at the messy middle where actual creative work happens. The constant back-and-forth prevents the silent, difficult thinking that leads to genuine breakthrough insights.
I think the best AI tools will be those that force you to do the cognitive heavy lifting yourself, not those that eliminate it. With this in mind, I’ve been building a few tools that prompt me on certain things when I get stuck, or force me to think deeper versus doing the thinking for me.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about new product experiences that leverage AI to create customer love/joy in unique ways. This week I came across Poke by Interaction.co, a life management/productivity product with a genuinely unique onboarding mechanism.
In short, it collects context on you and then forces you to haggle with it to get access to the tool. You have to prove your value to it as an early user and based on how persistent you are, you can haggle the price down. As an ex-VC it initially quoted me $1,997 a month and I managed to get it down to $5. I know people who have got it down to $2.63 a month, so give it a go and reply to this email with how low you got it!
This represents a shift from AI as passive assistant to AI as active participant with agency. Poke's AI negotiates well, makes demands, and has personality. To be honest, it got a bit old quite quickly and it wasn’t an entirely valuable interaction either so I’m split on whether this is pure gimmick (and a content viral loop) or actually genius.
Forward this to a founder who needs better signal.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you thought about the format. Feel free to hit reply and let me know, I respond to every email.
Abhi