AI & I

Founded in 2019, Linear is the rare company started pre-ChatGPT to have successfully reinvented itself as an agent-native business.
On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of the product management tool, to discuss building a platform where humans and agents develop software together—and why the "SaaSpocalypse" isn’t coming for all SaaS companies. 

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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction 
2:00 Why Linear waited to ship AI features instead of rushing to chatbots 
5:06 Linear's agent platform and becoming the system that guides AI agents 
7:42 Why "SaaS is dead" is a simplistic narrative 
12:18 How Linear adopted AI coding tools
17:45 AI's impact on product building workflows—speed versus thoughtfulness 
22:18 The value of conceptual work and thinking before shipping 
29:30 How AI is reshaping Linear's product strategy  
37:18 Demo: Linear's agent skills, shared context, and code review workflow 
47:48 The future of product development and the enduring role of human judgment

What is AI & I?

Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.

For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.