In the AI Gold Rush, the Boring Tools May Win
With everyone focused on AI chat, are we missing the useful tools that utilize AI in really helpful ways?
During the California Gold Rush, financial fortunes were made by those who supplied essential tools to the miners, not by the miners themselves. Levi Strauss and Sam Brannan became wealthy by selling tents, pickaxes, and durable pants to those panning for gold. Brannan's strategic move to buy up all the shovels in San Francisco before announcing the gold discovery allowed him to profit handsomely once the rush began.
Similarly, in the current AI landscape, the people making the biggest difference are not the AI models themselves but the foundational tools that support them. Founders across the tech industry are rushing to develop AI models, agentic frameworks, AI coding tools, and AI-assisted legal documents, just as everyone else in the Gold Rush was frantically searching for gold.
However, the most impactful tools in many builders' workflows have been PostHog and Supabase. These are not AI tools, but rather the "boring" components such as marketing, infrastructure, and the foundational technologies that enable AI to function effectively. Supabase, with its robust backend capabilities like auth, storage, and a relational database, provides the foundation upon which AI-generated content can be stored, versioned, and tied to user accounts.
Without a dependable backend like Supabase, the AI's content generation is rendered useless. Likewise, PostHog, a comprehensive product analytics tool, offers insights into user behavior that were previously unattainable with outdated analytics solutions. By providing real-time session replays and feature flags, PostHog allows developers to understand user interactions in detail, enabling them to refine and improve their products based on actual user data.
The combination of Supabase's reliable infrastructure and PostHog's analytics and AI-driven insights forms a powerful duo that allows for quick, scalable, and user-focused development of AI-powered applications. These tools, rather than the AI models themselves, are crucial in transforming ideas into functional, user-centric products that stand the test of time.
Written by urgent.news from HackerNoon's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
