Hamel HusainML Engineer Helping Companies Build AI Products

Why You Shouldn't Simulate Your Users

19 Oct 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:37

In this segment of his talk, Hamel Husain urges product builders to rely on real user interaction data rather than attempting to simulate human users or long‑running agent conversations. He argues that faithfully simulating a human essentially requires building an AGI‑level system, which diverts valuable engineering effort away from the core product. Unless a team’s business is explicitly a simulation platform, the time spent on such high‑fidelity user emulation is wasted. Husain’s practical advice is to gather actual user traces—by recruiting friends, colleagues, or any willing participants—to inform product development.

Chapters

I try as hard as I can to use real traces. Do whatever you can, like find users, get your friend to use it, you use it, get some, do whatever you need to do. If you have long-running agent trajectories and like conversations, et cetera, in the limit, like you're gonna have to simulate a human being. And simulating a human being is basically like AGI. You're gonna be spending a lot of time simulating this human. You're gonna be taking yourself away from working on the product and doing this like simulation thing. And unless you are building a simulation company or like a whatever, That doesn't make sense. I would say like, don't get into that. Like, let's go towards real traces.