The Pit of Success

Hey everyone,

Welcome back to Stocks To Space, where I curate the best ideas, tools and resources I’ve found each week as I explore my curiosities.

If you find something thought-provoking, forward it to a friend.

IDEAS
The Pit of Success

Rico Mariani, a developer at Microsoft, originally coined this framework as an approach to Software Development:

The ‘Pit of Success’ was initially used in the context of programming languages.

If you use a language like C or C++—especially as a non-expert—you can fall into traps like buffer overruns, memory leaks, and other potentially catastrophic issues.

In contrast, a garbage-collected language like Python gives you zero control over memory management, but in return, you avoid misery.

Many of the world’s best startups (like Replit, my favourite browser-based IDE) obsess about getting customers to fall into the ‘Pit of Success’ and effortlessly adopt winning practices.

Anyone building a startup must ask this fundamental question:

What kind of experience are you creating for your customers? Are you pushing them into a pit of success or misery?

(Click here to share this idea on X/Twitter.)

INSIGHTS
1 Chart

The quickest way to tank global stock markets

This week’s chat shows how global markets’ fall correlated to the size of Trump’s tariffs.

Unsurprisingly, the US President has expressed some willingness to cut tariffs if presented with “phenomenal” offers. Classic ‘Art of the Deal.’ Or as I’ve seen it phrased this week: ‘Art of the Tarriff…’

Unfortunately, global markets trade in real time. So, however quickly countries come to the table, the stock market damage has already been inflicted.

Where to from here? Anybody’s guess, especially with someone as unpredictable as Donald Trump at the helm.

1 Post

1 Video

TOOLS
Lovable

I recently employed a developer to help me build apps.

As I write this, they’re busy reviewing the code and building additional features, user authentication, and database tables so that my app will run efficiently according to the specs I gave it.

Every so often, I’ll check in with them when they need feedback, approve their next step, and maybe give input on something that’s not working as planned.

Unfortunately, I can't give you a big reveal now. But yes, that developer is an AI.

Lovable is one of many new ‘AI Software Engineers’ (alongside Replit Agent, v0 and Bolt) that will literally take you from “Idea to app in seconds” with one prompt.

And that’s no exaggeration, as outlandish as it sounds.

I’ve been using these tools for a short time, but they're truly mind-blowing. As someone who wants to build software but is predominantly non-technical, I'm amazed.

The possibilities feel endless… Whether I want to build a small internal tool with a simple prompt or give it a full PRD, it responds in minutes with a beautiful front-end and basic functionality.

Like anything technically challenging, it still requires work and iteration to deploy a fully functional app to production.

But damn, these things are getting good.

THOUGHTS
Quote I’m Pondering

“The ‘minimum’ in MVP is the minimum it takes to get someone to open their wallet, not the minimum it takes for the product to work.”

— Jason Leow, on X

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Thanks for reading,

— Luca

P.S. The first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are…