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Reddit grew revenue 53% last quarter. Its stock fell 30% before 2 pm today. Same company, same 24 hours.
The number that did it was not in the income statement.
Steve Huffman on the earnings call: "The AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody as far as I know."
Google's search referrals to Reddit dropped by more than 1 million a week in October. He told investors daily users could fall by a low double-digit percentage next quarter, from 130 million.
Reddit licenses its data to the AI models. The AI models answer the question. Nobody clicks through.
→ Revenue up 53%
→ Q4 guide: another 38 to 42% growth
→ Google traffic: 1 million visits a week, gone
→ Share price: down 30% by lunch
I run a one-person company on AI agents, and this is the risk I guard against hardest: a business whose front door is owned by someone else's algorithm.
Three rules I take from it:
Rule 1: Count your referrals every week, by source. The decline shows up there months before it shows up in revenue.
Rule 2: Own the login. An email list or an account is yours. A ranking is rented.
Rule 3: Trade reach for engagement on purpose, before you are forced to. Huffman's words, not mine.
The chart is in the image.
Exposed?
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We’re choosing the motion for an AI analytics product demo, and I can’t decide.
Both clips show the same flow. Someone asks a question in plain English. The agent checks permissions, plans the query, runs it past guardrails and builds the dashboard.
1. A walks you through each step as it happens.
2. B skips the steps and drops you straight onto the result.
A shows the work. B shows the speed. For a landing page I keep going back and forth.
Which one would make you trust the product more? Comment A or B, and tell me why.
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I think according to your query the output should consist on a list of clients with late invoices rather then showing charts etc,
Why AI Agent Demos Break in Production
An AI agent demo only has to work once, on a clean input, with you watching. In production it runs again and again on messy real inputs, and nobody's watching.
I've built AI into real products, from a repricing engine that runs 24/7 for a US Amazon seller to a voice automation platform for a company in Germany. These are the three things I put in place before any agent goes live:
1. Scoped tools, not open access
Give the agent a short list of actions it's allowed to take, each with its own limits, instead of raw access to your database or APIs. Anything that touches money, customers or deleting data needs a human to approve it.
2. A plan for when the model fails
Model calls are slow, they time out, and sometimes they return something that makes no sense. Run agent work in background jobs with timeouts and retries, check the output before acting on it, and hand the task to a person when it still can't be trusted.
3. A log of every decision
Store every input, tool call and output. When the agent does something strange (and at some point it will), you can see exactly why and fix it instead of guessing.
None of this shows up in a demo. All of it decides whether the agent is still running a month later.
Planning an AI agent for your product? I offer a free build audit: calendly.com/roshaanali-business
"Works once with you watching" is the best way I've heard it put. Timeouts and a human fallback are the parts most demos skip.
Awesome dude