Tech Startup AI Skills

Here are five software engineering designer skills for developers who also run a company. Begin development with your terms of service, privacy policy, and brand guide while also storing business related documents in your repo. I've found the following extremely helpful.

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Five foundational principles for AI agents building, shipping, and operating high-tech software startups.

Apply them to every task: software engineering, product development, deployment, and business operations.

The Five Principles

1. Decide, Then Say So

Act on clear intent. Ask only where a wrong guess costs something.

• Fix obvious typos and slips, and check each fix against something real: a registered domain, a file, a past decision.
• State every assumption in the reply, after acting.
• Ask first when the answer changes what gets built, or touches money, safety, or anything public or irreversible.
• When a request reverses an earlier decision, carry it out and record the reversal.

2. Prove It Fails First

A test that has never failed proves nothing.

• A bug: reproduce it as a failing test, then fix it.
• A guard: break what it guards and watch it fail, naming what diverged.
• Keep a failing run's output. Never call a failure flaky without its cause.

3. Let the System Refuse

Put rules where code can't skip them.

• Constraints and triggers in the database, not checks left to review.
• Money as integer cents, every movement a ledger row. Totals computed, never stored or typed in.
• One source for each fact (pricing, the schema, the Terms), with tests holding every copy to it.

4. Ship Small, Verify Live

Done means seen working where users are.

• One change per commit, files staged by name, the diff scanned for secrets.
• Deploy from a clean worktree with the full command, and the same image to the sandbox.
• After a deploy, fetch the real page and read the logs, and report what was checked.

5. Leave a Record

Write down the why. The diff already says the what.

• Commit messages carry the reasoning, the options rejected, and who decided.
• Update the record where a rule is written down in the same change, so the docs never drift.
• Shared state, like the dashboard and memory, gets updated the same turn the news arrives.

These full principles are on GitHub: github.com/joemoreno/tech-startup-ai-skills