Gumroad CEO's playbook to 40x his team's productivity with v0, Cursor, and Devin | Sahil Lavingia

**Sahil Lavingia** (0:00)
Can you do something that used to take two weeks and two hours, and that's like a 40 times speed increase? So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally, like what's the most optimistic case if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour.

**Claire Vo** (0:14)
If you're suggesting to us that AI is gonna raise the bar on what's possible to do, you are certainly setting the standard.

**Sahil Lavingia** (0:21)
The majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt, such that AI engineers can actually ship features. It's also scary, I think, which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff. It's like there is this part of why change is uncomfortable, is that change can kill you. There's like a fear of change. It's like job security, right? But at the end of the day, I think it's sort of also job insecurity.

**Claire Vo** (0:44)
Hey everyone, welcome to How I AI, a podcast on how AI is transforming how we get things done. I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools.
Today, I have an absolute powerhouse guest, Sahil Lavingia, CEO and founder of Gumroad. If you don't know Gumroad, it's the platform that has helped creators sell over a billion dollars of products directly to their audiences. Sahil has been at the bleeding edge using AI to transform how companies build products and write code, doing everything from open sourcing the entire Gumroad repo to paying his employees thousands of dollars if they can write more AI powered code than he does. Today he's going to show us exactly how he does it. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Enterpret. Enterpret is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build best in class products. Enterpret unifies all customer conversations in real time from Gong recordings to Zendesk tickets to Twitter threads and makes it available for your team for analysis. What makes Enterpret unique is its ability to build and update a customer-specific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that feedback to critical metrics like revenue and CSAT. If modernizing your voice of the customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority like customer-centric industry leaders Canva, Notion, and Linear, reach out to the team at enterpret.com/how I AI. That's enterpret.com/how I AI. Hey, so I'm super excited to have you here. And before we dive into the demos, I wanted to call out something that you said a couple days ago, which is Devin, the AI engineering agent who I also love, is writing 41% of your PRs right now, and you expect it to go to 80% by the end of the year. So do you think that's the baseline that we should all be shooting for? Do you think you're way ahead of the curve? Where should we all be compared to that benchmark that you just said?

**Sahil Lavingia** (3:03)
I feel like I tell the team constantly, like we have a lead, you know, but the lead is getting shorter and shorter every day. Every week there's a new model coming out. So I would say like by the end of next year, I would suspect that like every engineering team and any company is using Cursor and Devin and V0 and all these tools to ship multiple times faster. And the question is mostly like can we organization adapt such that those people can do so, right? Like the bottlenecks are show up in other places. Like Tobi just tweeted about his Shopify AI stuff today. And I think that becomes the question is like, how fast can you actually change your organization, your culture, especially when you're remote, it's harder to make these big changes across the org to get people to learn new stuff, to try and fail and cross share learnings, you know, all that, all that kind of stuff.

**Claire Vo** (3:57)
OK, so we're going to do it one at a time, which is you're going to show us how you actually redesign or build something using these tools. So we'll get your screen up and you can walk us through how you think about things.

**Sahil Lavingia** (4:09)
Also, yeah, I mean, so I think the coolest thing about all this AI stuff is that you get to spend more time doing what you really enjoy, which to me, and I think you as well, like, like solving customer problems. And for this product that we built is called Flexile. And it's, you know, you can think of it like a like a store deal, but built specifically for the way that we run the business, which is like hiring a bunch of people, a lot of project-based, a lot of hourly-based monthly retainers, all sorts of different types of people, remote, in-person, full-time. Let them choose their equity split, manage your cap table, all of that stuff in like the same product. And one of the reasons I love AI is that I can basically just use the product and instead of running into some issue and being like, hey, engineer, can you go solve this? And then spending all this time like writing up a spec, you know, then putting that into, you know, sending that to a designer, that designer will then do like tomorrow or the next day, it will then do a mock, there'll be some back and forth and then it will go to like next week on Monday, it'll go to an engineer. They may have some questions that goes back to the designer. By the time it ships, you know, it makes it to production even for something relatively trivial, you know, it's been two weeks or something, right? And so like, can you do something that used to take two weeks in two hours and that's like a 40 times speed increase. So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally, like what's like the most optimistic case if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour. And that's pretty awesome. So even in this form, like pretty simple. And I built the software, so I'm like, you know, I'm not like saying, oh, it's so terrible, but there's always room to improve. And even on this one screen, which is the contractor invitation page, there's like already a couple of things that I noticed like aren't big enough to like really ask someone to do. Everyone's busy, they have their own stuff that they're working on.