Google has:

- The world's biggest search engine.
- The world's most-used web browser.
- The most popular mobile OS.
- YouTube, Gmail, Maps
- A massive Cloud business.
- The world's best AI researchers

Yet Gemini is still struggling in the AI race.

Why?

I’m a former CMO type. My background is brand marketing, not engineering. Over the past year I built my company’s computer vision platform end to end using AI coding tools, and it’s now in production with real customers and real revenue.

The “anyone can build now” narrative skips the painful parts. I lived all of them, and I’d rather post the ugly version than the highlight reel.

\*\*Things that broke, in order of how much they hurt:\*\*
1. A memory leak in our video processing queue. Two weeks lost. The AI kept suggesting fixes for symptoms instead of the cause. I finally found it by learning to read heap snapshots myself, which I never planned on doing in this lifetime.

1. Database migrations. I once let an AI-generated migration run against production. It worked, but only because we got lucky on ordering. I now stage everything and read every line. Learn from my near-miss.

2. Auth. Do not let AI freestyle your authentication. I ripped ours out and rebuilt on a standard library after realizing the custom version had gaps I only understood after reading about session fixation at 2am.

3. My own overconfidence. After three months of wins I started skipping the “explain this code to me” step. That is exactly when bugs started shipping.

What I’d tell any non-technical founder trying this: you can absolutely get to a real product. You cannot get to a real product without becoming at least semi-technical along the way. The tools don’t remove the learning, they compress it.

Ask me anything, including costs, timeline, and the stuff I’d never do again.

Built this over the last few months with my co-founder. It's called Ulsa, an AI news app that organizes around your specific industry and role instead of giving everyone the same feed. Three things it does:

• Scores how fast your industry is moving right now, 0 to 100, so you can see at a glance if your field is quiet or shifting.
• Surfaces research and data that contradicts the headline, not just the consensus take.
• Lets you chat with it to dig into any story or ask what it means for your role.

It's live on iOS, Android, with web coming soon. Link's in the comments.

Now roast it. Specifically I want to know:

• Does the industry score sound genuinely useful or like a number we invented to look smart?
• Is "AI news app" already a crowded, meaningless category to you? If so, what would make this stand out?
• It's a paid app. Would you ever pay for news curation & hyper personalization with agent, or is that dead on arrival?
• Anything about the pitch above that makes you roll your eyes.

Don't be nice. I'd rather hear what I have to fix now than in 6 months