Editorial and AI policy
How this site is made.
The footer of this site says “Built with AI. Obviously.” That is true and it explains nothing. This page explains it.
Last updated: August 30, 2026
The short version
- I originate the arguments. Every thesis, ranking, and recommendation on this site is a position I hold, from work I actually did.
- AI helps me research, draft, edit, illustrate, and build. It is a tool I use in the open, on a site about using it well.
- AI does not get to invent a fact, a number, a quote, a name, or a war story. If a number is not measured or sourced, the sentence gets cut.
- Claims about other companies carry links. Claims from my own work say so, and name the situation.
- When I get something wrong, I fix it and log it below with a date.
- My name is on all of it. AI assistance is not a shared responsibility arrangement.
What AI does here
Specifically, and without hedging, because a vague disclosure is worse than none:
- Research. Pulling sources, reading documentation, finding what a company actually said versus what got reported about it.
- Drafting. First drafts from my outline, my argument, and my notes. Then I rewrite them. A draft that still reads like a machine wrote it does not ship.
- Editing. Cutting length, catching repetition, flagging the places where I asserted something I had not supported.
- Illustration. Every cover image on this site is machine-generated from a spec I write. They are diagrams, not photographs, and they are not presented as anything else.
- Code. This site is a Next.js application built largely with AI coding tools. That is the point. It is a working example of the thing the writing argues for.
What AI does not do here
It does not originate a position. If you read a claim here about how product work should be done, that is mine, and you should hold me to it.
It does not invent evidence. The drafting rules for this site forbid inventing a fact, a number, a quote, a name, or a story, and require gaps to be marked as gaps rather than filled with something plausible. Plausible is the failure mode. A confident sentence with nothing under it is worse than a missing sentence.
It does not sign off. Nothing publishes here that I have not read.
How claims are sourced
There are three kinds of claim on this site, and they are held to different standards.
Claims about the outside world get a link. Company teardowns, funding numbers, pricing changes, and anything attributed to a named person carry a Sources block with direct links to where I got it. If I could not source it, I did not publish it.
Claims from my own workname the situation. Twenty years of product leadership is not a citation. “This failed for me, here, and this is what it cost” is. Where I have had to sanitize a story for confidentiality, the shape of it is still true and I say that it has been sanitized.
Opinions are labelled as opinions. This site contains a lot of them, some of them deliberately provocative. A provocation is not evidence, and I try not to let the two wear the same clothes.
Corrections
Substantive corrections go here with a date. Typos and wording changes do not.
August 30, 2026
Removed fabricated live counters
The homepage carried a “live ship feed” and a counter reading roughly 158,000 “PMs who have switched,” growing at 15 per day, next to a pulsing green dot. None of it was measured. The counter was a constant plus elapsed time. The feed’s 1,401 “routes streaming” was four hardcoded numbers added together, the timestamps were fixed strings, and the builder names were invented. The globe prototype carried the same numbers plus the line “The data is real. The dots are people,” which was false.
All of it is gone. The globe survives at /prototype/globe labelled as illustrative, with counts that describe what is actually on the page. I built those counters to make an early site feel less empty. That was the wrong trade, and on a site that argues claims need evals behind them it was the most expensive thing on the page.
Common questions
Does AI write falkster.com?
AI assists with research, drafting, editing, cover illustration, and the code that runs the site. It does not originate the arguments. Every thesis, judgment, and recommendation here comes from Falk Gottlob's own product work, and he is accountable for every published conclusion.
Are the numbers on this site real?
Every number is either measured, cited to a named source, or drawn from Falk's own work and labelled as such. Nothing is estimated into existence. On 2026-08-30 several fabricated live counters were removed from the site for failing this rule.
How are claims sourced?
Posts that reference external companies, repositories, people, or data carry a Sources block with direct links. Claims drawn from Falk's own work are marked as first-hand and name the situation they came from.
What happens when something here is wrong?
It gets corrected in place, and the correction is logged on this page with a date and a plain description of what was wrong. Substantive corrections are not quietly edited away.
Tell me I am wrong
If something here is factually wrong, badly sourced, or reads like it was generated and never read, I want to know. Write in. Corrections that change a conclusion get logged above with your finding credited, unless you would rather they were not.