Hjálmar Gíslason
Five-time startup founder.
Curious about tech, media, life, the universe and everything.
Building for an Audience of One
Software got easier to build. The mindset is harder to change.
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Claude Shannon's Maze-Solving Mouse
In 1952, Claude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that could solve a maze. The clever twist: the intelligence wasn't in the mouse — it was in the floor.
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The Spark
What skills should students focus on as AI reshapes the job market? The answer is simpler than you might think.
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We're all product managers now!
With the rise of AI coding, every programmer, analyst, designer and end-user has become a product manager. The question is: how do we become good ones?
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Only for Sissies
The reception of Fortran in the 1950s sounds uncannily familiar. A passage from Richard Hamming's 'The Art of Doing Science and Engineering'.
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AI is eating SaaS
We just cancelled $32,000/year in SaaS subscriptions and replaced them with tools we built ourselves in about two days each.
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AI Fundamentally Changes the Startup Funding Game
What took $1M+ to build three years ago now takes two people a few weeks. The constraint has shifted from building to distribution.
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Hybrid AI and UI Is the UX of the Future
Building a slide deck with Claude Code convinced me: the hybrid AI and UI mode of working is the UX of the future — and we're currently over-rotating on chat interfaces.
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The Future Isn't About Letting AI Use Software
Today's AI agents simulate a human at a screen — mouse clicks, pixel-reading, typing into UI fields. That's a crude stop-gap. The future is software built for AI, not AI pretending to be human.