# Latent demand shows what to build next Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/latent-demand-shows-what-to-build-next/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Dan Shipper](https://realalpha.app/people/dan-shipper/) (Host) · Co-founder & CEO, Every · Sold his first startup, Firefly, to Pegasystems; writes Every's Chain of Thought. - Show: AI & I - Episode: [The Secrets of Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/), Oct 29, 2025 - Moment: 33:09 to 36:40 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/latent-demand-shows-what-to-build-next/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=1989 ## Quote > “you build a product in a way that is hackable, that is kind of open-ended enough that **people can abuse it for other use cases**” > — [Dan Shipper](https://realalpha.app/people/dan-shipper/) at [34:43](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2083) · AI & I ## Takeaways 1. Make extension points open enough for unplanned uses. 2. Watch what users hack together before choosing features. 3. Meta used profile views and buy-sell posts as demand signals. ## About this segment Build hackable primitives, watch how people repurpose them, then productize the demand. Meta's dating and Marketplace examples show how usage patterns surfaced those opportunities. From “The Secrets of Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It”, Oct 29, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/) ## Transcript From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode. [33:14](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=1994) Tell me about that because that's something I think about all the time is making something that is extensible and flexible enough that power users can find novel ways to use it that you would not have even dreamed of. But it's also simple enough that anyone can use it and they can be productive with it and you can kind of pull what the power users find back into the basic experience. How do you think about making those design and product decisions so that you enable that? [33:39](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2019) In general, we think that every environment is a little bit different from the others. And so it's really important that every part of our system is extensible. So everything from your status line to adding your own slash commands through to hooks, which let you insert a bit of determinism at pretty much any step in code code. So we think these are the basic building blocks that we give to every engineer that they can play with. [34:06](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2046) For plugins, plugins is actually our, so it was built by Daisy on our team. And this is our attempt to make it a lot easier for the average user like us to bring these slash commands and hooks into our workflows. And so what plugins does is it lets you browse existing MCP servers, existing hooks, existing plugins, and just like, or sorry, existing like slash commands, and just let you write one command in quad code to pull that in for yourself. [34:36](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2076) Hmm. There's this like really old idea and product called latent demand, which I think is probably the main way that I personally think about product and like thinking about what to build next. And it's a super simple idea. It's you build a product in a way that is hackable, that is kind of open-ended enough that people can abuse it for other use cases it wasn't really designed for. Then you see how people abuse it and then you build for that. [34:57](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2097) Cause like you, you kind of know there was demand for it. And like, you know, when I was at Meta, this is how we built kind of all the big products. I think almost every single big product had this nugget of weight and demand in it. You know, like for example, something like Facebook dating, it came from this idea that when we looked at who looks at people's profiles, I think 60% of views were between people of opposite gender. [35:21](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2121) So kind of like traditional setup that were not friends with each other. And so we're like, oh man, okay, maybe there's like, maybe if we like launch a dating product, we can kind of harness this demand that exists. That's interesting. And for, you know, marketplace, it was pretty similar. I think it was like 40% of posts in Facebook groups at the time were buy-sell posts. And so we're like, okay, people are trying to use this product to buy and sell. [35:41](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2141) If we just build a product around it, that's probably going to work. Yeah. And so we think about it kind of similarly, but also we have the luxury of building for developers. And developers love hacking stuff and they love customizing stuff. And it's like, as a user of our own product, it makes it so fun to build and use this thing. And so, yeah, like Kat said, we just build the right extension points. [35:59](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2159) We see how people use it. And that kind of tells us what to build next. Yeah. Like for example, we got all these user requests where people were like, dude, Cloud Code is asking me for all these permissions and I'm out here getting coffee. I don't know that it's asking me for permissions. How can I just get it to like ping me on Slack? And so we built hooks, Dixon built hooks so that people could get pinged on Slack and you could get pinged on Slack for anything that you wanna get pinged on Slack for. [36:26](https://realalpha.app/v/IDSAMqip6ms/?t=2186) And so it was very much like, people really wanted the ability to do something. We didn't want to build the integration ourselves, and so we exposed hooks for people to do that.