Tech Bytes - Software Growth & Strategies

Tech Bytes is a conversation about software as a business tool, hosted by Dan Hafner. It stays on the practical side of that idea: which tools to build on, what they cost, and what goes wrong once real people use the result. Several recent episodes are about building with AI. Hafner is open about how he got there. He says he spent a long stretch criticizing the vibe-coding world, asking what tools like Lovable could really do and whether their output was ready to ship, before he finally gave in. What follows reads less like a conversion story than a field report. He describes a client's internal app for work orders and labor tracking, first built in Adalo for a single user, which he moved into a vibe-coding tool in about a day. He claims his own output has grown tenfold in two months and says other builders can do the same. Money comes up as often as features do. Hafner explains a credit balance that refills itself whenever it falls under five dollars. He uses Opus 4.5 when generating a tool from a product requirements document and treats Sonnet as the cheaper option. After trying one small change on Opus 4.6, he calls it far too expensive on these platforms. That attention to the bill is the show's most useful habit. Security gets a graver hearing. Prompted by a story in his feed, Hafner lists what fast AI builds tend to skip: long-term security, the integrity of the architecture, and edge cases that appear as an app moves from desktop to tablet to mobile. His test questions are concrete. Can a user log out and back in as the same person, or make themselves an admin from a terminal? He repeats the old security saying that a defender must be right every time while an attacker needs only one flaw. Guest episodes change the voice but keep the focus practical. Kuber Jain works on engagement and retention on the Headspace analytics team and has also been at Asana and DocuSign. He talks about product-led growth, using AI to help fix code, and presenting insights to stakeholders and leadership. Drew Thompson criticizes 9-9-6 work culture, argues that hustling is the laziest thing a person can do, and compares it to running a hamster wheel ever faster. Adam Korga says a human element sits beneath every layer of technology. He also cites Conway's law, the idea that software architecture comes to mirror the organization that builds it. The conversations keep their rough edges, with restarts, asides and live reactions left in. A large back catalog sits behind these recent episodes for anyone who wants more.