Adrig

Damn people just forgot to think...

Chatbots also had huge drawbacks that are still present with AI: - Inability to see what outcomes are possible - Very constrained environment with only lightly formatted text - Sequential flow

You can see how the modern AI chat interface tries to overcome these issues. But even then, just the power of LLMs made users adopt this approach massively despite these drawbacks

Hindsight is 20/20, maybe you can accurately predict the inflection point of every modality, but the fact that most AI patterns currently used started as a quick experiment shows that most people can't, and probably shouldn't.

Yes definitely.

But I have to admit that in the design field we have a strong tendency to over-rely on "proper rules" and to overgeneralize learnings. (My pet peeve is when B2C patterns are transferred as-is in B2B or prosumers)

AI makes some old UX viable but can also unlock tons of value once you break your assumptions and reluctance. An example I see a lot here and on socials is how much of the code developers actually read nowadays. In the case of Instict, it is how many people actually share their credit card with an unknown startup's IA to buy stuff. I just heard on a podcast that 40% of them actually used their AI to buy something online (I didn't verify the %)

I'm the kind of guy who didn't understand why people use phones so much when a desktop is way more comfortable, so I have to keep track of the crazy ones!

I'm a designer, but I admit it's really hard to predict what products and UX are going to work in the AI age.

Chatbots have been tried for a decade and were a total failure. With AI, it has become the fastest-growing way to interact with technology, ever.

GPT-5 tried to have an auto router and create abstraction for the user; people hated it. Instinct and Muse are doing the same with a different framing; it's going wild.

There are tons of these little examples where a small difference in framing, a small threshold in tech, and product assumptions completely flip on their heads.

It's amazing to follow but requires you to be way more flexible in your assumptions.

Ah, forgot about that. I was questioning if I should switch my big subscription to ChatGPT (was on the 20$ Open AI and 100$ Claude), seems like a no brainer now

They could at least hack a minor government agency to show us they're alive...

This article answered a lot of questions I had about the direction Mistral is taking.

Great read, probably really smart positioning from Mistral but I can't help but be disappointed by the lack of ambition and innovation. This looks like more of a regulatory moat than a competitive technology.

Musk burned billions in brand value by renaming Twitter, and he'll be doing the same with Cursor. The Cursor brand was the only wedge he had with enterprise customers, who seem to avoid Grok products altogether

Alt link to the landing page if needed: https://x.ai/bot

Although I'll probably never use Grok, this is an interesting release. I always thought GPT work and Claude Cowork are a bit awkward in their positioning. I'm still not sure what the real difference is with standard chat. This looks like the same thing with seamless memory and skills creation.

This seems like the middle ground between work mode and OpenClaw/Hermes (which I've never tried, too scared to mess something up). I think the humanization of the agents is cute and makes sense UX wise. I hope to see alternatives soon.

> Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies

The point is that simple apps like these have just become insanely competitive to distribute, and it's best not to think of it as mini businesses

> Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I've not necessarily thought about myself.

For me a product = a packaged set of tools.

What was interesting with the micro-saas wave is that a lot of people started to build products around one simple tool. It worked because sometimes a well-crafted one is better unbundled. Here's one example that thrived on this premise: https://www.bannerbear.com/

Oh I love Rob, didn't catch this episode, thanks for sharing

Yes, disabled on the heavy text pages, still present on the home page!

Haha sorry about that. I made the changes quickly since a lot of people were reading, and I wanted people to focus on the content

> Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

100%, which is why I think hyper-tailored, small software is an exciting option. When you shift your goal to serve 1000 customers, the hardest part is not having a tech stack that supports them, but making sure the software is good enough for all their different needs. Or you try to meet them all and you get into feature creep.

> For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally

What if you neither buy or build the software but buy the service outcome?

A data analyst that creates custom workflows with auto-generated dashboards. A dev-ops that provides access with exactly the information you need, depending on the hand-off level you want for the process.

My point is that a lot of these micro tools that started to appear the last few years will vanish, either bundled with bigger SAAS, internalized, or shifted to a service offering. This trend started with productized services, this is the next step.

> SaaS is far from dead.

Micro SAAS*. I agree with all your points, but I do believe the small software landscape will change drastically in the coming years

Standard translation services lack the understanding of LLMs and LLMs are hilariously prone to these AI tells, even when you ask to avoid them.

I try to learn writing and copywriting directly in english to avoid the awkward translation effect, but I focus more on the rythm, structure and content than the prasing itself

Thanks for the feedback. I wonder which system they use, WCAG is notoriously limited so I often use APCA and both cleared this combo

But human eyeballs can vary wildly, hence the need for tools. I'm the kind of person who uses the sepia mode for reading, so I didn't expect such strong discomfort from readers. This feedback surfaced a lot here, so it was a blind spot on my part.

Anyway, did a quick fix, should be enough for now

Possibly.. I admit I'm quite bad with distribution, hence why I usually work with a few clients long-term.

But we do see a sharp rise in the release of apps, without the same tendency in use. [1]

I do think there will be a place for SAAS, even micro-SAAS, but the competition will be fierce and I don't have a lot of hope for indiehacker without any "unfair advantages" like unique knowledge, data, network, etc

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ericseufert_this-ft-chart-vis...

Glad to see I'm not alone! I removed it from the articles pages, but you can still go wild on the index page. BTW my high score is 1626

Fable helped me edit since I'm not a native English speaker, so I might not catch these subtleties. Thought and structure are my own

Definitely. I wonder if this will be an increasing factor when choosing vendors. Will the security risk drive companies away from small software, due to their use of AI? Will we see a bundling of features in big established vendors?

Will they invest more into in-house security? (Doubting the last one).

For small apps used to deliver a service in my examples, I believe the risk surface is way narrower, which might make it more acceptable. For better of for worse

Text is WCAG AAA?

Yeah my bad, this is a fun effect for the landing, didn't think much of it when publishing the first article, fixing now, thanks for feedback!

> RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper

I started using a few open source apps for transcription and eventually subscribed to a paid one...

On paper, it's not hard to compete, but for this use case, a few rough edges make it really frustrating to use. Like a keyboard that sometimes doubles the letter "e"

Automatic dictionary, seamless language switch, no issues with accents, etc... Putting the effort in the last mile makes a world of difference.

If anyone has better options, I'm willing to have a look. The best open source solution I found was Handy, and I currently use Wispr Flow

They are heavily invested in custom automation for industrial partners; this should be a welcomed addition to their toolkit

A few months ago, I had some data cleaning to do; their small model was surprisingly efficient and got the job done for 0.2x what I expected to run (Anthropic Sonnet / Haiku). Their TTS / STT is also roughly at the frontier, at least for French.

But I admit I only consider them because they're from France. Haven't seen a dimension where they're competitive for general users

- A HTML prototyping skill and a simple upload web app to share it privately with my team

- A Chrome extension to make design comments and ASCII wireframes right on the page you're working on and feed it to your AI coding tool as a prompt https://getdesignjam.com/

- An iRacing overlay to compare the telemetry of a reference lap against your live data https://flylapsim.com/

It's been a ton of fun to be able to dabble in software thanks to AI. Especially for small personal tools like these it's so powerful

Yes, that's the real strenght of it. The structure is dead simple so you just have to switch the goal metric.

I used it on a data science project to find the best rules for achieving a defined outcome. At first, for fun, then I actually used some of its insights (and it caught a sampling issue I overlooked, oops)

I used Ministral for data cleaning.

I was surprised: even tho it was the cheapest option (against other small models from Anthropic) it performed the best in my benchmarks.