Superhuman charges $30/month for email when Gmail is free. That's always forced them to maintain a different quality bar from most products, and it shapes everything about how they build AI features too.
Loïc Houssier is CTO at Superhuman Mail, and one of the most fun and energized engineering leaders I've gotten to work with. In this conversation, he walks us through what quality really means when you're building a "luxury" software product - and how that mindset applies to AI.
We dig into the high-dimensional challenge of building great AI experiences around email, from auto-drafts to semantic search. We talk about how they approach evals when every user's inbox looks completely different, starting from the hardest queries they can find internally. And we get into how Superhuman is adopting coding agents across their engineering team - including their "quality week" practice and why they removed all procurement blockers for AI tools.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro: What "luxury" means for a software product
2:12 - Loïc's background and why he joined Superhuman
6:02 - Game design principles in product development (not gamification)
10:14 - AI features at Superhuman: triage, search, and auto-drafts
15:34 - The challenge of building AI features in a high-dimensional space
20:00 - Building evals from the hardest internal queries (the "wood for my coffee table" example)
24:20 - Privacy and how they handle eval data
25:45 - Their mix of models: BERT, fine-tuned, open source, and frontier
28:19 - What quality means when your competition is free
30:10 - Quality week: dedicating the first week of every quarter to bugs and AI workflow improvements
32:44 - How they're adopting coding agents internally
35:30 - Removing all the blockers for AI tools (e.g. 24-hour security approval, unlimited budgets)
38:06 - How Loïc ramped up on AI as a leader
40:15 - Parting advice: choose your vendors wisely, and enjoy this moment as a builder
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