Bryan Connor

@krispuckett Every environment and product culture seems so divergent, which is a big part of not knowing how to start.

If you read this and don’t know how to start, DM me or reply. Let’s figure it out together. We’ll need more creatives who build in this new era: building the future now.

@ben_issen this is sick

the age of designers

@dsllwn Ha you may have a point but once you know you can’t stop thinking about it!

@bryanconnor this cannot possibly be common knowledge 🤣🤣

Watching people discover naming agencies exist

Gemini Omni ignored my instructions and output the same 1 second video three times and now I’m at my usage limit. But it’s a powerful model, I think?

Looking for a full-stack web engineer to do an 8-week contract. Full time, remote. If you’re interested send me something you’ve built that you’re proud of!

@emollick Codex is supposed to be an everything app??! But yeah don’t hide stuff, just spend time designing and expanding the shorthand and metaphors that coders have unconsciously hard-wired

Codex is very good, but it is still a very "developer coded" interface for an everything app. And it continues the somewhat annoying AI perspective that non-coders are just not as competent and need stuff hidden from them, as opposed to requiring a different form of complexity.

Good gravy

@joulee @TeamSundial This is such a good way to frame it. Turns out knowing how to give good feedback on other people's work is a massive advantage. Conjures the image of an artist obsessively applying brushstroke after brushstroke.

Taste is invisible until you try to write it down. This is probably my biggest lesson with AI building as of late. At @TeamSundial, I get to work with really friggin' amazing analysts who know the art, and I see how much of our collective time now is now spent turning that art into playbooks or skills for an LLM. Encoding things like: "How would a great analyst actually look at this metric move?" or "What is ACTUALLY the interesting signal in this story versus noise?" or "How can we know if a product change actually moved the needle?" It's really humbling work! You write an instruction set. The LLM misses. You add more context. It still misses. You add even more. Now it's confused. You strip it back. Now it's too vague. You try a different framing. Better, but inconsistent. Works on Monday, fails on Tuesday. You go again. I've come to realize the gap between 70% quality and 95% quality is not 3 or 4 big things. It's more like 100s of small things. Which is exactly why you can't write an article about it, or copy it, or shortcut it! This gap *is* taste, quantified. The accumulated weight of a thousand small judgments you don't notice you're making, until you sit down to externalize them and realize you can't. Being good at something is not the same as being able to articulate why you're good at it. I now see two bottlenecks to making something better than today's generic AI: 1. Can you *see* what better looks like in the first place? 2. Even if you can see, can you *articulate* what that is in a way that the LLM can understand and systemize? #2 is now a new craft, the art of distilling the art. The people who can do it well are the ones building standout products.

/radio

On fire today

The inability of AI systems to act as their own deployment consultants, process mappers, and change management experts is what makes AI use in enterprises so “normal” - the tools are powerful, but you need a lot more to transform enterprises. Possible to imagine that changing .

This is great

@jstrelioff Hey Jessica, you can check out a selection of my branding, editorial, and data visualization work here: notion.so/bryan-connor/B… Would love to talk to the team!

Design twitter: A friend of mine is working at a health-tech company and is looking for a freelance designer with digital magazine/editorial experience to help beautify all things content. Reply with your portfolio and I'll send their way!

@thetimgabe Is there a role for design in helping founders get to an idea that works?

founders need to stop wasting money on design. i see this on calls every week. the main problem is that they want design before they have a truly working business. i could be greedy and take them on, because we can improve your retention. redesign your paywall. optimize your onboarding. but if your core idea isn't working, those gains won't pay off. you're polishing a broken machine. get to $10k/month first. consistent users who actually use the app. prove the idea works. then bring in design. that's when design improvements REALLY compound. take one of our current gamification clients who just reached #2 in the US app store last month. day 14 retention up 1.14%. revenue per user up 1.1%. completed offers up 0.86%. they have millions of monthly users. they paid out 12.6m euros last month. those "small" percentages stack FAST. remember: no amount of design will help a bad idea. but once you've proven the idea, design is the multiplier that can make your business a lot of extra money.

😅 oh boy, becoming a big problem in services and saas products - you can ship things before you have time to ask one other person if they have the same problem.

Honestly love this slightly backwards-feeling design use case for claude. Sometimes it's just too many rectangles man

You know shit's getting real when I pull this book off the shelf

Oh I see we have some CEOs newly comfy with showing their true colors, as it were

Couldn't believe this when I saw it the other week. Haven't come across anyone else who thinks about AI as an employee. Even the AI agent people. They've since reversed course but why bet on such a risky approach? lattice.com/blog/leading-t…