When Bas first added me to this group, I could barely have told you what an API was. I've been mostly quiet since, because I was heads down building something, and I finally get to show you. But the win I want to share isn't the one I thought I'd be writing about. A few weeks in, I was at my kitchen table testing a feature, and my own app wrote something back to me. A little message, the kind it sends to a stylist. I read it and I cried. Me. The person who built the thing. It had just made me feel seen, as a hairstylist, and I wasn't ready for that. I'm a solo hairstylist. That's my actual job. The app is called Rooty, a companion for stylists who are tired of being told the only way to stay booked is to become a full time content creator. I built it between clients over about seven weeks. Here's the part I think this group will appreciate, and it genuinely surprised me: the code was not the hard part. The boring receipts: - 212 commits, about seven weeks, built between appointments - One Python file, roughly 8,000 lines, zero dependencies, just the standard library - 132 tests - Multi-tenant, real logins, running live right now with actual stylists signing up - Claude Code did the heavy lifting on the code, Anthropic's Haiku model runs the AI features - I directed all of it. Every product decision, every word of the voice, every call about what it should and shouldn't do. I'm not a programmer. I'm the person who knew what it needed to feel like. That last line is the whole thing, so let me stay on it. The code, honestly, the AI and I got through together. What I could not outsource, what no prompt handed me, was knowing when a message sounded like a brand instead of a friend. When it was technically fine and emotionally wrong. I felt those the way I feel a bad section in a haircut, right away, in my gut. And I sent them back. So the "it feels like it gets me" that people react to, that came from real decisions: - The captions and replies learn from my actual writing, not a formula. They sound like a person because they're trained on one. - Every AI feature is its own little room with exactly one job. None of them is a general chatbot. A tool that tries to do everything feels like nothing. A tool that does one thing warmly feels like a friend. - And me. I was the reject button. I read hundreds of generated lines and killed every one that rang false.

I did a quick search here, but didn't see many posts that even mention the French AI/LLM "Mistral" (https://mistral.ai/)? What are some of the community's opinions or experiences with this? Even YT doesn't have much on it. Upside: Frontier model, open weights, options to self host, token costs (less than the big three, more than the Chinese AIs), 25% cheaper basic paid subscription ($15US instead of $20). Downside, it's in the EU, it's French (lol) and there's the whole digital wallet thing and EU nanny state mentality. I've been looking at it's features with a few chats this week and I wonder if it's a viable alternative. This is about the best video I've found on it so far: "The AI Model Nobody's Talking About — Mistral 3.5 & The Sovereignty Question" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkbREGlNX8Y