Every single day, Ferni changes.
Not big dramatic launches. Small improvements. Tweaks. Fixes. Things we noticed yesterday that we're addressing today.
Sometimes it's a bug someone reported. Sometimes it's a conversation we read that suggested a better approach. Sometimes it's just "this could be 2% better" and we make it 2% better.
Shipping every day sounds like a small operational detail. It's not. It's a philosophy.
Why Daily Shipping Matters
1. It keeps us humble.
When you ship once a quarter, you have time to convince yourself everything is great. The launch becomes an event. The pressure to be perfect becomes enormous. The gap between your assumptions and reality widens without you noticing.
When you ship every day, you can't pretend. Yesterday's code is in front of users. Whatever is broken becomes obvious immediately.
2. It keeps us honest.
Big launches create incentives to hide problems. "We can't delay the launch for this." "That issue can wait until the next release." "Ship now, fix later."
Daily shipping removes these escape hatches. There's no "later." There's only today and tomorrow.
3. It keeps us improving.
Progress is hard to see when you're inside it. Day to day, nothing feels different.
But compound something by 1% every day for a year, and you get something 37x better. That math is real. We've watched it happen.
What We Shipped This Week
This isn't theoretical. Here's what actually shipped in the last seven days:
- Improved how Ferni handles pauses in conversation (less awkward waiting)
- Fixed a bug where memory retrieval was slightly too slow
- Added better detection of when someone is processing vs. when they're done talking
- Refined Maya's language around habit formation (less prescriptive, more curious)
- Updated Peter's analysis patterns to better explain "why" alongside "what"
- Fixed pronunciation of several names that were being said wrong
- Improved handoff smoothness between team members
None of these were big. All of them made Ferni better.
The Infrastructure That Makes This Possible
Shipping daily isn't just about willingness. It requires infrastructure.
Automated testing. Every change runs through tests before it goes live. Not because tests are perfect, but because they catch the obvious problems.
Gradual rollouts. New changes go to a small percentage of users first. If something breaks, it breaks for a few people, not everyone.
Easy rollbacks. If something goes wrong, we can undo it in minutes. This makes us braver. We can try things knowing we can retreat.
Monitoring everything. We know when conversations are going well and when they're going poorly. We notice issues in real-time, not in quarterly reviews.
What Users Experience
Users don't see the commits. They see something that feels alive.
They notice that the thing that annoyed them last week is gone this week. They notice improvements they didn't expect. They feel like Ferni is evolving.
This matters for trust. A product that never changes feels abandoned. A product that changes constantly feels attended to. Someone is here. Someone is paying attention. Someone is working on making this better.
The Uncomfortable Parts
Daily shipping isn't always comfortable.
Sometimes we ship something and it's worse. We have to notice, fix it, ship the fix. It's humbling.
Sometimes we're not sure something is ready but we ship it anyway because waiting won't make us more certain. We have to be at peace with uncertainty.
Sometimes we want to do a big dramatic reveal but can't, because the improvement happens in 47 small increments, not one magical moment.
These discomforts are features, not bugs. They keep us grounded.
The Philosophy Underneath
There's a deeper belief here: perfection is a trap.
Software is never done. Users' needs change. Technology changes. Understanding changes. The best you can do is keep making it better.
A product that ships quarterly is optimizing for the wrong thing. It's optimizing for feeling ready instead of being useful.
A product that ships daily is optimizing for reality. For learning. For staying in conversation with the people using it.
Ferni talks to users every day. It only makes sense that we respond every day too.
This is Part 6 of our Building in Public series. Part 7 explores the emotional core of what we're building.