There's a version of "building in public" that is pure theater — a highlight reel dressed up as transparency. That's not the version I'm interested in. The one I keep circling back to is quieter and more uncomfortable: publishing the thing before you're sure it's good, and letting the reaction tell you something you couldn't have guessed from inside your own head.
Feedback is cheap to give and expensive to interpret. A comment that says "nice work" costs the commenter nothing and tells me almost nothing back. It's polite noise dressed as signal. What I keep returning to is prediction markets — not as a gimmick, but as an honesty mechanism. If someone has to put something at stake to express a belief, the belief gets sharper. A market price on "will this feature actually get used in 30 days" is a different kind of information than a thumbs-up ever could be.
I think about this specifically with early versions of PAI — the rough, half-finished builds that are more hypothesis than product. Every one of them is a bet about what matters, made before the evidence exists. A market wouldn't replace judgment. But it would expose which bets people are actually willing to back, versus which ones just sound good in a comment thread.
Maybe that's the real argument for building in public: not visibility for its own sake, but a willingness to let the world price your guesses before you've had the chance to convince yourself they're right.
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