My design process: - Look at other tools for inspiration - Hate how Notion handles this - Come up with a gazillion ideas - They all suck - Realize Notion actually handles it correctly after all, it's just a hard problem with no perfect solution

I love the genre of post that's like "AI doesn't think/plan/learn, it just <description of exactly how humans do that same thing>" AI doesn't learn, it just studies lots of examples of things and then applies those concepts to solve new problems its never seen before.

It seems like AI amplifies bureaucracy. Internally at LACRM, things are pretty normal in terms of emails, meetings, project plans, etc. We were already light on overhead, and it's stayed that way. Bigger companies with lots of overhead seem to be getting overwhelmed with AI slop for internal comms.

thanks i'll get right on that

I feel bad for new SaaS entrepreneurs. Tech startup fuckery has burned so much trust that I have no idea how you could expect customers to trust you if you don't already have an established history. I'm not sure I'd ever use a new startup's product for anything important.

A nice benefit of 12-hour time is that having am/pm attached to a number makes it clearly time. With 24-hour time, you pretty much have to put minutes in order for it to be read as a time rather that some random number.

Every time I try to use Apple software, it's just the worst. I tried sticky notes and the notes app to keep a short list of text handy and both tools just suck in so many ways. I tried their new window snapping and it sucks. Numbers: Sucks. Weather: Sucks. Photos, Messages, Calculator...

It's not a good sign when it's easier to ask Claude what the price of a SaaS tool is than it is to figure it out from their pricing page. This post is about Webflow.

It's easy to think that when the free trial has ended and the customer has paid, the sale is completed. We send a feedback survey to people 3 months after they subscribe and a *very* common response is, "how am I supposed to give you feedback? I've barely had time to even figure out how this works"

Here's an example of how many little details Claude Design gets wrong when working with a complex SaaS app (as opposed to a simple marketing site). Claude Design on the left, Figma on the right. It's good enough to prototype an idea, but there's now way this replaces Figma for pixel-perfect designs

I've been testing out the new Claude Design tool. Some thoughts: - Incredible and whipping up a nice-looking marketing site - The tool for creating a design system is very neat and fun to play with - It's not even close to being able to work on pixel-perfect designs for a complex SaaS app

It's neat that AI lets you ship stupid little things that you otherwise wouldn't have time for. A customer jokingly submitted a feedback form asking us to "hide a secret frog" in the app. That's going live right now.

I think my city (St. Louis) has a bunch of problems, but they're putting in protected bike lanes and curb bump-outs and pedestrian islands all over the city and since that's what I actually experience every day, it feels like this city is crushing it. There's a marketing lesson in there somewhere.

We have 120 DNS records. It's getting pretty unwieldy. What's it like at a big company? Is there some IT person managing like 10,000 DNS records?

I'm getting so much more spam (both email and phone) now, and I assume it will get even worse. It would be incredible if those channels get so destroyed by AI that they just completely stop working entirely. They've always rewarded the most annoying marketers, so I'd love to just shut it down.

It's got to be a bummer to work at Dropbox. Still a great product, but absolutely no one wants your product to do anything it couldn't do a decade ago.

A new spam technique that I hate: They act like this is the 2nd or 3rd email they've sent me (and make fake quoted emails at the bottom). I think "well I didn't block them the first time, so maybe this isn't spam". Fuck those people.

Lots of discussion about what the new Apple CEO might do. People don't seem to realize that it's a $4 trillion company that has to become a $5 trillion company in 1-2 years. His mandate isn't to make MacOS better or whatever. He has no choice but to enshittify. This is systemic.

How did donuts become breakfast food. It's like starting your day by eating funnel cake.

AI is making me realize something that I should have understood long before LLMs became a thing: The 2010s were a weird magical decade in which SaaS didn't obey the normal rules of capitalism, and we all learned bad habits during that time.

This pattern will appear all over the place. e.g. if all bug bounty reports are coming from AI tools, shouldn't we just run the AI tools ourselves? Generally: Having someone else run the AI for you is pointless. AI should be run first-party. Third-party contributions must be human, not AI.

I love having an alley behind my house for a bunch of reasons. One of the least obvious is that it makes disposal of big items super easy. I can leave *anything* in the alley and some random dude in a truck will find it and take it within a few hours. What's he doing with my stuff? No idea.

Anyone sharing cumulative user/customer/revenue charts is lying to you. That's worthless data that is deliberately misleading. I lose trust in Bluesky every time they do it. It should be daily/weekly active users. The fact that they're sharing cumulative numbers tells me the real numbers look bad.

Like all dev teams, we're trying to figure out new norms for working with AI. One change we just made is: Code reviewers should not submit comments that came from AI. The author should have AI review the code, but if a PR goes to a human, that doesn't mean "can you ask AI to review this"

It's hard to feel proud of being an American right now. The president is openly bragging about genocide, and the only way to get anyone to give a shit is to point out that it's making gas more expensive.

I hear people talk about how AI-generated marketing sites all look the same, but I haven't personally developed the ability to detect that. So question for you all, does this website have any obvious AI-generated tells: lacrmsite.vercel.app Still a work in progress in case that's not clear.

I opened up Firefox just now and saw this. Looks like I clearly got malware somehow, right? That VPN thing looks sooooo bad and sketchy. Nope, Firefox just added it as a built-in feature and decided to make it look like shit for some reason.

I want to run for mayor on the platform of undoing all the random little sections of streets named after people to honor them. It's very nice that you're trying to pay tribute to someone, but we use this shit to navigate. Put their name on a bench or something.

I was once in a mastermind group where two of the people discussed how they get around robocalling regulations by paying a company in India to have a person click a button to initiate every spam call. Just a person clicking a button as fast as they can, and then a bot handles the actual call.

I was really enjoying the "for you" feed, but recently it's full of atpro people arguing about whether it's ok to use AI and the arguments are both toxic and boring. I guess I'll go back to the following feed for a while and hope things die down. I'm glad my immediate follows aren't like that.

I can't believe that Github has gotten so unreliable that we're seriously discussing removing it from our deploy flow. It's great for code reviews, but it's terrifying that we can't deploy to prod when Github is down right now.

Notion has always been slow and buggy, but it was so useful that I didn't mind much. Recently, that has changed. The performance has gotten noticeably worse, and I've encountered more bugs than ever. It's still an essential tool, but I find myself reaching for anything else before Notion.

This might be my favorite review ever. I know that businesses use all the shady tricks for a reason (it works) but every once in a while, it works to just not do any of that crap.

Something I hate about b2b SaaS is that all I want to do is polish our existing product, but what the business needs is for us to add features that will just make things more complicated. If we were growing, I'd be like, whatever, I'm doing what I want, but that's hard to justify when plateaued.

I'm working on a project that has the perfect balance of "Claude Code is doing almost all the work for me" and "It's made a handful of errors that I easily caught so I still feel like I'm needed"

Every time I do support, I'm amazed at how sophisticated our support team is. I know more about the product than anyone, but there are so many systems, tools, etc. that I can barely keep up. And this is stuff that AI isn't even close to being able to do. It's not about answering questions.

I realized why a lot of AI stuff doesn't resonate with me: Many use cases are for middle men at huge companies. People whose job it is to analyze, make reports, and send internal emails. We just don't have those roles at LACRM, so when I hear about those use cases, it just seems so unimportant

I love designing software products, but I think mobile responsiveness has made it more boring that it used to be. Everything is just rows inside containers that can stack nicely on mobile. It would be *really* fun if you could assume everyone had a 4k screen.

One of the most uncomfortable parts of leading a company is that in order to do your job, you have to talk/write a lot. And the more you do, the more likely you are to say something dumb. So you just have to be cool with knowing that employees often think you just said something dumb.

It's crazy how suburbs are super crowded yet have none of the benefits of population density. Not walkable, no non-chain businesses, no public transit, but somehow waaaay too many people.

It feels like if you don't adopt every new AI model and switch coding agents every week, you'll get left behind. But let's just remember that being, like, three weeks behind the cutting edge is totally fine, and you can get that by sticking to whichever tool you're using now.

Even their support link didn't work with the AI features turned on. Canceling the AI trial fixed everything. The "companies are just shoving AI slop into their products" narrative isn't wrong. Can we please slow down and make sure our new features actually work?

Yesterday I started a trial of Notion's new AI features. They mostly don't work, but they have made base Notion way buggier, so there's that!

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It's a point of pride for me to give customers what they want without giving them what they asked for. Obviously this can be taken too far, but solving customer problems in ways they didn't think of generally leads to more elegant products. It's how you make a product feel premium and intentional.

Just had a customer tell us they retired, but they keep paying for their LACRM account just to support us because we're one of the few companies that still values customer service. Obviously it's hard to build a business around getting donations from retirees, but it sure does feel good.

Americans often complain about here vs. Europe. Not the obvious political/cultural clusterfuck, but just stuff like walkable neighborhoods and a real sense of community. It's sad most of America is so hostile to live in, but you don't have to cross an ocean to solve it. Just move to my neighborhood

Sometimes I hate my dumb brain. One of my three monitors broke a couple months ago, and I've been meaning to replace it, but it wasn't urgent because two monitors is plenty. Now that I've ordered the replacement, I want it NOW and I'm getting frustrated having to use just two monitors.

Customers often compliment LACRM by comparing our design to Apple's ("it just works"). I know they mean well but I take this as a grave insult.

More in the adventures of "stats are less useful than you think" We've been focusing on the trial-to-paid conversion rate. That seems like the best way to measure whether our main strategy is working. But I just realized this metric has actually been lying to us.