Feedback Loops are All You Need — Mehedi Hassan, Granola
May 10, 2026 · 10:11
Mehedi Hassan, a product engineer at Granola, argues that shipping AI features into production requires building feedback loops rather than one-shotting better prompts. Granola's chat feature for meeting notes revealed problems with web search — token costs ballooning to 10p per chat, overnight provider updates silently degrading results — and with prompt personalization, as a single prompt cannot serve salespeople, engineers, and HR managers equally. To close the gap, Granola built custom internal tracing exposing tool calls, search trails, reasoning, and cost in a UI accessible to non-engineers, not just CloudWatch queries. They also refactored their Electron app's renderer to run as a web app, enabling preview links on every PR and allowing Cursor to automatically test changes and upload screenshots. The result is faster iteration and confidence that shipped features actually work for customers.
