Thanks @ken.cv - fun little easter egg in our student login where after a while this little guy pops up and follows the cursor around (and hides when the user is typing in the password 💜) - blog post on implementation is coming soon

I’m surprised companies want to automate the fun creative stuff that people actually want to do instead of all the nonsense that they don’t..

Or take my camera SD card, search for all images of me & autoformat it.. tag my screenshots in various attributes so I can search it later. I can think of so many repetitive brainless tasks that get in my day.

These are just Sunday evening thoughts because I have had too much coffee and my brain is just going brr. But I would love to hear what people think.

Imagine I want to design an android app so AI generates for me a figma just for android, where I can pull up android native libraries and APIs to prototype an app.. where I am designing and the output is directly being expressed in flutter or kotlin. Or HTML and CSS..

In the earlier case, I wanted to make a UI for generating truchet tiles. Then I made a UI for swapping out patterns. Then I made a UI for selecting colours. Then I made a UI for similarity. I can go on and on..

Most design tools are deterministic where output is dependent on manipulation of fixed number of different parameters of a particular entity. What if I can increase parameters and create new ones? But I don't want AI to just make things for me. I want it to help me think about new things I can do

I think one thing we are not thinking about in AI tools for designers is fluidity and emergence of controls where AI doesn't just generate outputs, but helps expand the possibility space of what can be created

I think it could be an interesting AI usage pattern. Instead of prompting to generate something high fidelity from scratch in one shot, you iteratively prompt your way in low fidelity to a better starting point then take over manually from there. so it feels more like partnership then replacement

I prompted Claude! I kind of like how it's responding on this

Replit is his portfolio company and job as VC is being a hype man so that more people use his company’s product and he gets a return on his investment.. it’s how I am reading it

How he described it is - edtech startup hits X ARR / MAU and then a pvt equity like renaissance or publisher like Pearson comes and makes an offer. post acquisition the focus moves from product to sales and marketing. Over time the product withers. They buy another product and start the cycle again

I was talking to my founder about how all companies who reach a certain scale in edtech get acquired by these PE behemoths or large publishers.. and there are few cases of standalone companies that are making money and at a certain scale. I suspect such a dynamic is true for a lot of industries

I feel like there’s also a consolidation around early adopters which have network effects and distribution.. It’s not so hard to build the product (it’s still hard) but how do you go from there to getting a large user base that you can make money sustainably from…

The implication of this is that it requires something more than craft of design and hype from early adopters to create a viable company. And the circumstances in which these companies raised money or operated no longer exists, and it’s unviable to operate.