news.ycombinator.com• Mar 13, 2026• 1 min read
Notes from the trough of sorrow: why we killed our own productIn December 2024, Roundtable was a survey fraud detection company. Our product Alias analyzed typing patterns in open-ended text fields to catch bots and AI-generated responses. It worked and market research firms used it to flag the 30%+ of survey responses that are now AI-generated.Twelve months later, we open-sourced it and built something else.---Matt and I spent five years at Princeton studying how humans and machines process information differently. We've published in Science, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour on computational models of cognition. The thing we kept coming back to: humans overshoot mouse targets, slow down on the Stroop task, type with irregular timing. Language production is a cognitive process, not a copy-paste operation. AI agents don't produce these signals. And scaling AI doesn't close the gap. It widens it.Alias captured a narrow slice of this: typing patterns in text fields on surveys. Proof of Human captures the full surface: keystrokes, mouse movement, scr
