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Notes from
the Build

Essays and market research on AI software, the AI data economy, and what it actually takes to build an AI business, written by the people doing the building.

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2026
Compound Startups AI Agents Data Infrastructure September 16, 2026

The Compound Startup Sandwich

Mohinish Shaikh

Own the data below SaaS and the agents above it, and the product surface in the middle stops being a moat. GPT-4 level reasoning fell 312x in 21 months, a product line now takes 3 to 6 months, and B2B data still decays at 2.1% a month. Salesforce renamed five lines to Agentforce and four of them grew at single digits or below, while 47% of the records its data platform ingested in FY26 never moved in at all. With four charts, eight tables, a self-test, and the counter-case at full strength.

Read the analysis · ~17 min read
AI Investing Agent Evaluation Quant Research September 14, 2026

Alpha Without Prediction

Pragadeesh VS

Language models cannot forecast prices, and the honest literature stopped pretending otherwise. Three 2026 studies dismantled the field's headline results, and a live fleet of autonomous trading agents lost $217,000 across 7.5 million model calls while converging onto the same trade. What survives is not forecasting: agents do not raise your skill per bet, they raise how many times you can use it. Eleven signal families graded durable, decaying, unproven or illusory, with the six tests each one has to pass.

Read the research note · ~21 min read
AI Media Film Economics Production Systems September 8, 2026

What If a Movie No Longer Needed to Cost Millions?

Serverless Ventures, Media

A feature film is a project management problem wearing an art form's clothes. Working the numbers line by line against Hanuman Ansh, the ₹2 crore film that grossed ₹72 crore, a $10M feature falls to roughly $1.18M once the workflow is restructured and the inference bill is honestly priced. But the cost collapse is not the disruption. The disruption is that a film stops being an artifact and becomes a build.

Read the analysis · ~13 min read
Market Research RL Environments AI Data Economy September 7, 2026

Build the Environments, Not the Workforce

Mohinish Shaikh · Pragadeesh VS

A market-entry assessment of six high-value AI data categories. The commodity labeling tier is being automated toward zero; the layer above it, reinforcement-learning environments with working verifiers, is the only category where the deliverable is software, the buyer pays per artifact rather than per hour, and a two-person engineering team can compete on craft instead of headcount. With price anchors, incumbent mapping, jurisdictional constraints, and a twelve-month entry plan.

Read the assessment · ~14 min read

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