Launching Calibre
Our mission: to help software companies redesign product practices for the AI age
We are thrilled to officially announce our new company Calibre - an applied AI research and consulting firm. We aim to work with CXOs and product leaders to help launch high quality AI products and redesign product practices for the new age of AI-native software. You can learn more about us and reach out here.
2025 was a whirlwind year in AI. Reasoning models went from novel to everyday reliable use, even winning gold medals in the Math Olympiad. Vibe coding went from fantastical to mainstream, dominating the news cycle. Claude Code emerged as the first CLI tool to cross $1B in run-rate revenue, less than a year after its quiet launch. Google made a massive comeback in consumer AI with Nano Banana Pro images driving subscriber growth north of 650M MAUs. Last but not the least, context engineering emerged as the new frontier enterprise problem to solve and AI evals the most critical new skill set for product builders. The best AI startups grew like firestorms, breaking every growth record of the past decade.
Personally, last year was a tale of two cities for both of us. We watched the startups that we worked with completely reinvent their products and software development cycles every few months. Role definitions started breaking down between product, design and engineering. CEOs struggled to hire executives and leaders who could translate their past experience to new playbooks for the AI era.
On the other hand, for public software companies, it feels like everything changed and nothing changed. Moats seem at risk of disintegrating. Investors question whether any point solutions in SaaS have a venture backed future. Yet, most large enterprises still operate more or less the same way they did in 2024. Their AI launches have been slow to get adoption and face quality challenges. This year, they are up against a ticking clock as customers start demanding AI that delivers on its promises of efficiency and reliability.
The reality is that transformation at scale is slow and building great AI products for enterprise use cases is extremely difficult. As you start growing your user base and tackle an increasing variety of personas and needs, it only gets harder to reliably deliver a high quality experience.
While shipping code might be getting faster, evaluating whether an AI product actually delivers a good experience is anything but automated. The best teams spend hours everyday on human review, painfully aligning evaluators to their product taste.
As LLMs and coding agents get even better in 2026, it will be easier than ever to ship prototypes but harder than ever to scale them. As Karri Saarinen, the CEO of Linear put it eloquently - the middle of software work is disappearing.
“Understanding the problem, gathering the right context from customers … what becomes more in focus is the work of forming the right intent and making sure the outcome actually meets it.”
In other words, the work of product managing AI software is going to become more important and challenging than ever. 2026 will see:
Rising demand for AI-native engineers, designers and PMs who approach product development with both opinionated taste and rigorous evals.
Breakthroughs in continuous learning, with frontier agents that recognize knowledge gaps and autonomously invoke tools to learn new skills.
In some way, both of us as early Ampliteers have always believed in this dream - of leveraging data to build better products that users love.
To bring this future to life, we need an entire generation of product people to learn how to build and improve AI systems. But this is not just a problem of individual skills - we need organizations to learn as well. Product leaders need to redesign their processes and retool their orgs so teams can ship AI products that work well at scale.
This is our mission. To help grow the next generation of product builders and support leaders in shipping high quality AI products that live up to their promise.
If you have been reading our newsletter Mania, we are officially rebranding it to highCalibre! In 2026, you can expect
more regular updates from us with a focus on AI product leadership
case studies and examples of how top AI builders are building tasteful agents
practical guides and how-tos on evaluating and analyzing AI products
This is going to be a groundbreaking year in applied AI and we are excited to ride this rollercoaster with you.
Turning Mania into HighCalibre teams, see what you did there Justin.