When I first started designing, I focused a lot on making interfaces look polished. Over time, I realized usability and clarity usually matter more than visual effects.

One example for me was simplifying layouts instead of adding more components. Users completed tasks faster, even though the UI looked less "fancy."

I used it for a year or two, but eventually went back to iTerm because I found the UX to be over-complicated and slowed me down. (Also, I'm a dinosaur with too much muscle memory to overcome...) But the AI features were interesting, so I'm curious what ya'll see as alternatives, or if you think I should give it another shot.

One benefit I see is that it will usually produces something very politically correct that will usually go through the endless censorship that has taken over the internet (personally on the web since beginning of the 90's it was something else entirely, a mix of academic papers & free flowing ideas on clumsy graphics all over the place - oh boy that was so much decentralized and fun).

But then I only see problems: flatness, falseness, shallowness, lack of originality, creativity and most of all the dependency it slowly develops.

I tested 10 prompts like "best tool for X" in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Our product came up in 2 of 30 answers, and a competitor with less traffic showed up in 14.

Curious how others approach this:

• Do you track AI mentions at all, or is it too early to matter?

• Has anything you changed (docs, reviews, comparison pages) actually moved the needle?

• Is "AI search visibility" a real channel yet, or mostly hype?

I m currently trying to find the first customers for my startup, and I don t yet have the budget to hire a marketing specialist or agency.

AI has become my temporary marketing assistant. I use it to:

• research potential customer segments;

• review and improve outreach messages;

• prepare questions for customer-discovery calls;

• analyze replies and identify patterns;

• turn marketing experiments into clear next steps.

However, I still research each company, personalize the message and send every outreach email myself. The difficult part is finding the right balance between saving time and sounding like another automated sales message.

A few years ago I was juggling a bunch of projects constant back and forth with PMs, designers, clients and actual design work in between calls. I didn t have the bandwidth to write correctly . I'd reply in less than a minute, typos and all, and get right on to the next fire. Months later I d read an old email and cringe at how rough it was, but nobody seemed to care at the time, or maybe I just never learned if they did.
These days half the tools I use every day have grammar checks and sentence help built in Gmail, Slack, whatever I happen to be typing into. And somewhere along the way I started to trust them fully. I will type something, see it 'fixed' and send it without reading a word of it. I didn t decide to proofread myself. It just kind of quietly stopped needing to be.
I honestly don't know if my writing improved or if I just stopped being the one to review it, which is a strange thing to notice in hindsight. They seem to be very different things but from the outside they probably look the same.
I m curious what that has been like for other people who write a lot for work has it changed how carefully you actually write, for better or worse, to lean on these tools? Or did it never really make any difference to you at all?"

I recently came across a post on X saying that "if you're strong at execution but struggling to level up as a leader, you may not be simulating before communicating".

This caught my attention as I do simulate a lot of important conversations before they happen. I've recently used LLMs and interview coaching tools, and even vibe-coded my own tool to act as an AI coach. But my main issue is that every time I use any of these, I have to start over and rebuild the context of what matters and what not, and run into the same frictions again. That in addition to constantly tuning the often sloppy AI advice.

My mum tells people I "work with computers". My dad has decided I have something to do with marketing, which is closer, and he says it with a slight question mark at the end. I've explained it properly maybe four times. It never sticks, and I've stopped being annoyed about that, because I think the fault is mine. Every explanation I give starts from the product instead of from the problem.

Which is exactly what's wrong with most homepages, including ours.

So what's your parents' version? And have you ever found a way to say it that actually landed?