DEV Community: Yan Nerovny

I handed AI agents almost the whole product. Except one part - and that part is the job

Yan Nerovny — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:18:17 +0000

Recently an agent built a working prototype of MERIDIAN in a couple of days. A live page - where I've been, where I am, where next - plus a world map the app draws itself from the EXIF in your photo library, on-device, with zero manual input. Expo, React Native, a black SVG map. What would have taken a week of dense frontend a year ago was ready to screenshot-test the same day.

Here's what that speed did. It didn't remove the risk - it moved it. While code was expensive, the main question was "can we build it." Now building costs almost nothing, and one expensive question is left: am I even building the right thing. The risk moved off "make it" and onto "decide what to make."

So I rebuilt how I run product. Not around who writes the code - there's unlimited code now. Around who decides which code is worth writing at all. I barely write myself - I hand tasks to agents, check, and cut. Below is how it's wired. Not "look at my system," but something you can copy.

What the agents do, and what I hand to no one

The work is split into pieces. Each piece has an agent that carries the volume, and a piece I keep. The line between them is the whole job.

Discovery. Agents comb the market, competitors, user conversations, my own note archive - and pull out what I physically can't read in time. I keep one question for myself: which of these patterns am I willing to believe, and which just sound good.
Hypotheses. An agent spits out twenty versions of a feature faster than I write one. The volume is its. The taste is mine: which two of the twenty are even worth touching.
Decisions and priorities. Here the agent is a sparring partner, not a judge. It sorts hypotheses against what I actually know, argues, looks for holes. The final cut - what goes on the roadmap, what goes in the bin - is mine. It's irreversible, you don't delegate it.
Build. Claude Code and agents write the code, the design, the schemas. I read their output the way a senior reads a junior's PR: not "does it work," but "is the estimate lying, did they cut a corner that blows up in a month." I came into product from engineering - I started on JavaScript and React, then tech lead and eng management - and that's a tool now: I catch lies in code because I wrote code.
Review. A separate agent attacks what the first one built. Its job is to find where it falls apart. More on this below - it's the heart of the whole thing.
Orchestration. The layer holding the other five: which agent on which task, in what order, with what context. That's Yan OS - a layer on top of Claude Code: projects, agents, schemas, hooks, scheduled runs, a handful of MCPs. One conductor. Me.

Notice what I did NOT hand to agents: deciding what to believe, the final roadmap cut, and checking someone else's work for lies. Everything else is volume, and volume is cheap now.

How one agent catches another one lying

An agent left alone lies with confidence. It generates a hypothesis, justifies it, and serves it as fact - in the same tone it would use for the truth. So the one that generates and the one that checks are different in my setup. And between them sits a simple sort. Every claim - mine, a user's, an agent's - lands in one of three buckets:

know - real data, behavior, a pattern that holds.
looks like - a signal, not proof.
want it true - a wish, unconfirmed for now.

Anything in "want it true" gets a test attached: confirm or kill. Nothing rides into the build unmarked - and my own gut gets the hardest check, because it's the loudest.

Where this actually saves me. An agent proposes a feature and writes "users want X." The second one goes to the source and finds that "want" is one thread in one chat. That's "looks like," served as "know." Without the second agent that "want" would have rolled onto the roadmap dressed as data. With it - it gets a test and waits. Costs pennies, and catches the most expensive class of error: confident lying that looks like fact.

What the speed exposed on MERIDIAN

Back to the prototype, because the whole point is in it.

Before MERIDIAN I killed the previous hypothesis - Nomad Bridge, a two-sided marketplace for nomads. It didn't survive my own teardown: two sides, both needed from day one, the classic cold start that kills marketplaces, and the only paying demand I could find was by analogy, not by evidence. Inside that dead product sat a small feature I never took seriously - a profile page with a map of the countries you'd been to. I threw it out with everything else.

Then I spent a month looking for the next thing. Around 350 ideas, nine runs with agents, and in almost every run one motif kept surfacing - that same movement map. The feature already in my hands, that I hadn't seen.

Here's the trick. The agent built the prototype in days - and that speed is exactly what showed the hard part was never the code. The hard part was that I spent a month scoring 350 ideas on a spreadsheet and nearly missed what was in my pocket. When code was expensive, slow building masked the error in my head - you build so long you never notice you're building the wrong thing. When building got fast, the one real job was left naked: decide what's even worth building.

Where it breaks (without this part it's an ad)

Honest now, or everything above is just a nice shop window.

The client of this system is me. One user, who's also the developer, who's also the one who needs it. Which means the gains aren't proven by numbers - only that it suits me better, which is the weakest proof there is. Yan OS isn't finished and, honestly, by its nature never will be.

Next - an agent loves its own ideas. A second agent grown from the same model tends to love the first one's ideas a little more than it should. So I keep the final knife, not the second agent: it lowers the lying, it doesn't zero it.

Context costs money and attention. For an agent to judge well you have to feed it the right context, and gathering and keeping that context fresh is work nobody counts until it quietly eats the speed gain. A system that saves hours on the build easily returns them through the back door, on wrangling context.

And the main thing - I can't be replaced exactly where there's nothing to check against. An agent is brilliant when there's a reference to compare the answer to. When there's nothing to compare - when the question is "am I building the right thing" and the market hasn't answered yet - taste decides, appetite for risk, and willingness to carry a product for years. That doesn't hand off yet. The whole thing stands on it - more on that here: when building gets cheap, judgment becomes the job.

What a team buys when it hires a person

Put it together. When design and code are almost free, a team hiring a product person stops buying a pair of hands to execute a spec. There are unlimited hands now, and they're cheaper than any hire.

What gets bought is exactly what I didn't hand to agents: deciding what to believe, the discipline to kill your own hypotheses, and a nose for lying that sounds like fact. Not the person who writes a PRD faster. The one who runs the agents that write the PRD - and knows which one is worth building.

I built this alone, with agents - the same way I ran Unicorn Embassy for three years with zero ad spend. Building dropped to nothing. The price of judgment is the only thing that went up

I'm Yan Nerovny - product lead and founder of Unicorn Embassy. I write about product, AI and building from anywhere at nerovny.com/writing.

Running product with agents yourself? The part worth stealing is the three-bucket sort - known / looks-like / wanted-to-be-true. Tell me where it breaks for you: Telegram or LinkedIn.

180+ events, 9 cities, 7 countries, zero ad spend - here's what I learned about growth

Yan Nerovny — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:35:44 +0000

Kadıköy, Istanbul, a Sunday in 2023. The second floor of a Turkish guy's coffee shop, about thirty people packed in, someone standing in the aisle - strangers pitching each other their startups. My first event.

A year earlier I'd flown in from Russia - first time abroad in my life, first flight ever, not a soul I knew in the city. I built this room over that year myself, by hand, without spending a cent on ads. And over the next three years that same scene repeated 180+ times across 9 cities in 7 countries - still zero paid acquisition. This is Unicorn Embassy, and it's the cheapest way to gather an audience I know.

What follows is how it's done, step by step - not a memoir about how great I am. Behind the no-ads numbers sits a simple sequence I ran in every new city. And it's about growth in general, not just meetups.

Why community, not ads

I left Russia in 2022. Istanbul was the first country - you land and get a residence permit on the spot, you can't do that in Europe. I touched down without a single contact.

And I started showing up at other people's events. Other people's tech meetups, startup gatherings, Russian-speaking hangouts - anywhere they let me in. After a couple of months I noticed one thing: the people who show up in a community regularly end up with everything - projects, jobs, cofounders, investors. Not the smartest ones. The ones in the room.

So I decided to build the room myself. It's one of the most important decisions I've made, and I made it for a simple reason - not to be alone in a foreign country. The payoff came later: through those same communities I'd go on to find projects, cofounders, and work.

How I entered a new city, step by step

Here's what I actually did. Not theory - the sequence I repeated in Istanbul, then Belgrade, Dubai, Tbilisi, Yerevan. The city changed, the mechanics didn't.

Walk every local event. First you're a guest at other people's events. It's recon and networking at once: you see who speaks here, and you meet the people you'll invite later.
Pull speakers straight from there. A good talk at someone else's meetup is a ready speaker for yours. You don't hunt speakers in a vacuum, you take them off stages that already work.
Find a venue in parallel. You don't wait for the perfect one - you take what's free and lets you in. In Istanbul it was a coffee shop with a second floor, already a favorite of Russian clothing swaps and leetcode groups.
Start a Telegram chat and announce the first speaker. Announce a specific person, not "come to our event." A name in the announcement is the first reason to show up.
Keep walking other communities and invite people in person. A cold post doesn't fill a room. "Hey, I'm doing a thing on Sunday, come by" to someone's face does.
Find other people's chats and cross-post there. Someone else's audience that your topic fits is your first traffic. Free.

Now the key move, the one without which none of this scales. When you arrive in a new city, you don't carry it all yourself. You find a local - someone who already has an audience and an interest in the scene - and you make them an offer. Not "help me," but "here's what this gives you": organizer status, a network, visibility in the community. People who got a kick out of it stepped in and ran the location themselves. That's how the same mechanics traveled the world without me being in every spot at once.

What compounds, and what burns off

Not everything you do in a community turns into an asset. Some of it just burns off. The point is knowing what stays.

The format compounds. I started with masterminds - everyone pitches a project, the rest give feedback. Then speaker talks got added. Then shared dinners after, sometimes till morning. The format wore smooth against people and became portable: you arrive in a new city and bring a ready structure for an evening you already know how it'll go. You can hang an "event" sign in one night; a working format takes years.

The rhythm compounds. The Istanbul venue was free on Sundays - so I made Sunday my thing. There's no magic in Sunday, it's the predictability that works. People know when to find you. Regular beats flashy.

Reach is the one thing that doesn't compound instantly. Organic is slower than paid, no illusions there. Ads would have filled the room for the first event. Organic filled it by the third. But a room that came for ads scatters when the ads stop. A room that came because a live person from the community invited them stays and brings the next ones. Money buys attendance. Your own room you don't buy - you build it.

The numbers it added up to

Over three years, with no grand plan and not a single "turning point" - I just moved around the world and ran meetups as a way of life:

180+ events
50+ pitch sessions
150+ startups pitched
6,000+ people, in person, not followers
9 cities across 7 countries: Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Spain, Serbia, the UAE, Indonesia
zero paid acquisition

One idea sits under those numbers - a bridge for post-Soviet founders into the global market. Someone from Minsk, Almaty, or Tbilisi who knows no one outside their bubble gets, through community, access to people, projects, and money they'd otherwise reach in years. Right behind that, those same founders hit the next wall - where to actually base the company, which I covered separately in founder visas for Spain, Portugal, and France. I was building for myself the thing I didn't have when I landed in Istanbul alone.

What carries over into product

I don't call this growth instead of meetups by accident. Community taught me three things I now apply to product directly.

First - cold start is solved not by scale but by the first live person. A marketplace dies on cold start because both sides need the other side from day one. Community teaches the opposite: you launch one room that's worth something even to the thirty who showed up, and the network grows on top of that. Value for one before any network effect. I built the same principle into my product - how I test its hypotheses.

Second - growth isn't a department that switches on after launch. I spent three years building traffic by hand and I know it from the inside: a channel you built yourself is cheaper and sturdier than any you bought. Knowing where your first and hundredth user come from is the CPO-level work, and "ship a feature" isn't even half of it.

Third - trust is a currency, and it isn't for sale. The room trusted me because I showed up every Sunday for three years, and ads had nothing to do with it. Same in product: retention is built on predictability, not on a launch.

So when people ask which channel to buy more of, I answer with the one nobody sells: the room that fills even the week you stopped paying for it

I'm Yan Nerovny - product lead and founder of Unicorn Embassy, the community described above. I write about product, AI and building from anywhere at nerovny.com/writing.

Building distribution without a budget? The six-step sequence above is the part worth stealing - run it in your own city and tell me how it goes. I'm on Telegram and LinkedIn.