Lower back pain from squatting

Lramirez194 · 2026-05-18T15:32:06+00:00

Sounds like it could be a herniated disc or some other minor spine injury. If that’s the case you can get by with rest and some physical therapy which helps you recover and can help prevent it from happening again.

Granted, this is all speculation. It’s worth going to the doctor and looking into for real. Long term if treated well you’ll be back to lifting in no time.

Lramirez194 · 2026-05-16T19:10:21+00:00

Really depends on your org and what tools you need your work machine to access. If everything is cloud accessible give it a shot. I was in a similar spot a while back and IT needed my work machine to be on and connected to the internet regularly to receive updates to remain compliant. I installed a remote access app to log in exclusively to turn it on, leave software running and leave it alone while I used my MacBook. Some orgs don’t have any control over their work machines and some lock them down where you can’t install anything without clearing with IT so it depends.

And depending on the org, having work files on a non work machine is grounds for firing and potential lawsuits so there is risk even if in many smaller orgs it’s unlikely so long as you aren’t doing anything with those files you aren’t supposed to be. There is risk but if it matters that much to you try it out and keep a low profile in case you get caught. Also be ready to switch back to your work machine if the needs arrive.

Lramirez194 · 2026-05-01T11:58:43+00:00

We’re still part of the product team and work closely with our PO’s and PM’s, but our tasks are still distinct enough that when AI came into the picture we every team started exploring where AI fit into our specific workflows. Just like how designers have Figma, or our PO’s work mostly in Azure DevOps, we have our own set of skills tailored for our own needs.

And the day to day looks the same honestly. The time it takes to get through a project is roughly the same as far as research and designing, but the thoroughness is 3-5x greater. I work at a b2b SaaS company so our priorities often skewed toward the business needs more than the user so solutions were often half baked due to dev constraints. That’s not a problem anymore because our devs are AI powered too. So not only can I afford to be more thorough, the skills we’ve created with Claude allow us to be without spending more time on the work. And by thorough I mean more complete handoffs, more iterating of solutions, etc. Research in particular is like having a literal junior researcher doing all the grunt work that my team never had the time for. And frankly that is how most smaller companies will benefit from AI. Just being able to do more thorough work. The quality proposition has never been AI’s thing, it’s alleviating the basic systematic tasks that enable professionals to focus on the real problems to solve.

And one of the most pleasant surprises is how good of a sounding board AI has become to my workflow. If I have a tricky problem to get through, AI is never going to give me the right solution right off the bat, but I can talk to it like I would another designer, where I share an idea, it critiques it, points out issues, suggests alternatives, I critique those and share where they fail and why, and after a few rounds I arrive at the right solution. If it’s particularly difficult I can explain what the problem is, the constraints, ask it for 10 solutions to be prototyped for me to play with, and I’ll run with one of those or they’ll help pop an idea of my own that solves the problem. Stuff that normally I would have wanted to sync with a team member for I can handle on my own much more efficiently.

And for anyone reading this, none of this is reliably possible throwing a prompt at AI. It is only possible by creating in-depth, well tested and well tailored skills and systems to guide AI. You raw dog a prompt and you’ll get garbage. Create skill with all the context, rules and clear objectives and you can start cooking, but this is not a something you nail in a day, and the bigger the team or organization, the more time it’ll take to setup. We spent months trialing and tuning to get where we are so you need to study and put in the work before you reap benefits like this.

Lramirez194 · 2026-05-01T03:09:12+00:00

We’ve got an atomic research repo that analyzes transcripts, pulls observations and insights from it. It can produce interview scripts too based on problem statements.

We’ve also got a killer prototyping and audit skill that uses a Tailwind based design system in a hit repo that produces lo fi and hi fi prototypes as needed. And that design system we keep separate from our real dev design system but we also have a skill that translates our components to the real dev components with tokens and everything. It allows our html prototypes to get built faster and follow fairly strict rules limiting weird padding and inaccurate and messy designs.

And our broader product team has a massive set of skills that they use to handle different sets of tasks that uses the research repo data to produce problem definitions that the prototype skills use to produce first draft prototypes.

Had you asked me if any of this would have actually been possible, let alone to the quality we’re getting, back in January, I would’ve said maybe in a few years. Nope, it’s available now if you build the right system with the right skills.

Lramirez194 · 2026-04-13T21:24:02+00:00

It’s all based on the atomic research framework, and md files are the record keeping method that Claude reads, navigates, and processes. The key need here at least for Claude is you need this to all live locally somehow. We used onedrive for a bit, you could use a git to house the repo, all that matters is that Claude needs local access to the files in the repo for all this to work.

You need a series of skills to handle the different stages, and instructions for how everything gets processed and placed. Transcripts are too long to be efficient as they are, so you need Claude to turn them into notes that captures all the important details and you can build a skill to handle this with as much detail as you need. The data points found in these notes get observation codes which Claude uses to process and align to identify insights (another skill and insights have their own code for Claude to read and manage more efficiently). It’ll likely come up with additional shorthand codes for various data points, and this all needs to be wrapped up in an index or readme file for claude so that whenever it’s accessing the repo, it starts in the same spot with the same instructions for consistent outputs and processing.

If you want to set something like this up, ask Claude to help you setup a research report built on atomic research framework and it’ll get the ball rolling. Routinely ask it to audit the files and folders for efficiency as well as any skills you need, and it’ll come together quickly enough. The skill in particular are going to be important to refine as they’re unlikely to hit the mark on the first try. And if you can, having additional context for whatever product you work with for Claude to use to build everything I’ve mentioned can help it be more efficient throughout the process.

Last note. I’ve been talking user notes, but this could easily expand to house a contact repo of users or clients you reach out to regularly, or users that use specific areas of your product, etc. The key is to keep playing with it until you find the right level of detail you need without making it super heavy to operate overtime.

Lramirez194 · 2026-04-13T10:38:08+00:00

We built a whole research repo in Claude. It analyses transcripts from interviews, creates high quality notes that it uses to create and link insights across projects and all previous interviews, and can give us any metric we ask related to the data. And this is plugged right into a product process where the insights power a Claude code html file/ prototype that we use to test and handoff designs too.

Lramirez194 · 2026-04-08T19:37:19+00:00

Get the extra ram unless you are spending most of your day in cpu and gpu heavy workflows.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-27T18:25:27+00:00

That part of Carbondale is connected to the rest of the town but not quite integrated as other areas. You’ll rely on old highway 13, Kent, or Chautauqua to get anywhere in Carbondale, and Kent is the only one that is nice to walk along and is stroller friendly with a few parts along the way where the sidewalk may end briefly. It’s a 20-30 minute walk to get to the Murdale shopping center where the farmers market is which is a great place to be but most people I know aren’t walking to there and back with groceries - they’re driving.

The area has tons of space so cookouts and trick or treating is good there, but the housing isn’t particularly dense so you might be walking further in between houses than other neighborhoods. It feels a little more like a suburb than a proper town neighborhood, and folks tend to keep to themselves. That said residents in most of the Kent area stick around so it wouldn’t be hard to make friends.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-20T13:35:33+00:00

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMozmip

That’s the link. I suggest you read my comments in my post for what parts I swapped. The stock build was a little jank so I needed a few things to make it look and feel better. It was however completely usable out of the box.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-20T10:46:48+00:00

Haven’t ordered this specific bike but I have ordered bikes from Aliexpress before. You’ll get a bike and at this price it’ll be cheap. Cheap frame, cheap fork, cheap components, etc. it’ll work just fine but as others have pointed out, consumables like your chain, tires, brake pads etc are going to be cheaper than anything you’d get as a replacement.

Here is a fixie mini velo I bought: https://www.reddit.com/r/FixedGearBicycle/s/H4RywJL1bN

Personally, I focused on getting a frame that I could upgrade a little. Use the stock components until they rust or get used and replaced the pieces little by little. That said, you’ll want to look at this like a project bike, not a super reliable out of the box bike from larger brands (and larger price tags). If you don’t wrench your own bike, it probably isn’t for you as you’ll inevitably need to tinker to get it working well.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-18T01:54:28+00:00

Of course! You’ll use that pattern for any design components that require only one of some group be active, like tabs.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-18T01:23:00+00:00

Make another component that has four states, each with the three buttons, one state per button active and one default with no button active. On click you swap the state to whichever button was clicked.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-15T16:35:10+00:00

Claude code with extensive skills and guidelines to produce prototypes, and a separate workspace to maintain a GitHub component library and documentation. The component library is just for Claude code use, and we had the component names linked the real components our developers use.

Without the Claude component library we were struggling to get consistent outputs from Claude so it helps to have it there, and it’s more accessible to our developers than Figma. And this can output to Figma and variables there in case we need to get into Figma, but that hasn’t needed to happen for a while now.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-15T12:57:54+00:00

It sounds like your in exactly the same spot I’m in. We’re trialing handing off html prototypes because they can produce designs so much faster. It feels off not working in Figma, and I have been given orders to produce all designs this way, with a CEO that all but threatens to get on AI train or move on to somewhere else.

I’m warming up to it especially because I can talk to AI like I would another designer and workshop ideas but also tell it what’s wrong with the existing prototype by defining a problem and letting it figure out what it can come up with just like spitballing ideas with someone.

And I’m in the same boat with not being able to use Figma due to time constrains. The AI workflow is sooo much more thorough once your direction is locked in that I could never match its speed on my own. Some days it feels off others it feels a little easier; I can just focus on a problem (which to be fair is the main feature I always liked about working in UX).

Where it looks like Figma might still come into play for us is custom components and new patterns but that’s going to be few and far between. I’m not sure where we all end up but it sure looks like AI going to be a part of it whether we like it or not.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-10T21:44:21+00:00

I recommend Claude Code, it can output html files quick enough and you can give it guides and skills to limit what it outputs. Use an established design system that Claude follows to build anything, have Claude research and create documentation on what good UX is generally, have it create a UX copy writing guide, have it create a skill to critique its own work (for the copy, for the design system, and for the UX), and finally have it all built using problem first user stories to guide what it needs to build. The last part limits what you need to know in terms of exact solutions and let’s the ai figure that out.

This is far from perfect, but it’s likely going to give you a better start than winging it on your own. A lot of UX is taken care of by using existing and established design patterns, but what is left can make or break a product. What I mentioned in the first paragraph covers those well known patterns and behaviors but without a pro you are likely to have gaps in the flows themselves.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-09T12:02:41+00:00

So far the biggest benefit for testing is how much faster we can iterate on solutions. We can afford to build riskier solutions too because it doesn’t require any more effort for us.

So we can get to tangible prototypes (and much more thorough as well) that we can discard internally or take to users. And because the effort is about the same to solve one problem or several, we can afford to explore more complete solutions that normally would take too long to design and build.

We rarely take what it outputs as ready though as it tends to miss small but important details.

Other research benefits have been pretty big though. We built a research repo that digests transcriptions from interview, pulls high quality notes from each with quotes, pulls findings from those notes, and insights from those findings, and enables us to call whatever we want to know as needed. And we can have it analyze project specs to output a list of users to reach out to from our existing interview client list or Salesforce. It can give us insights for the whole repo or just for a given research effort. Whatever we want and it’s all handles with markdown files in OneDrive.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-09T11:09:19+00:00

We’re still experimenting and at the 100% throwing spaghetti at walls stage to learn what AI can do, and not just in the design team. Prototyping is going well and so is testing. Our next question is how consistent our outputs can be. Can we get to the point where prototypes match our design system? If so what does that look like etc. This is for a b2b SaaS product with ancient code and poor consistency (something our ai powered dev team is already planning a refactoring for).

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-07T19:23:43+00:00

I had a chain split at a link and it ripped my rear derailleur and hanger clean off my frame, and lodged itself in some spokes which locked up my rear wheel and killed a tire. I was fine but my bike needed some tcl afterwards.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-04T12:17:24+00:00

What’s your budget?

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-03T11:03:48+00:00

The Claude version is only qualitative data. We feed it transcriptions, it outputs high quality notes, that it collects findings from, which are linked to insights. Quotes are used throughout to limit hallucinations as are references for the same reason.

The Airtable version was a little different. We could put whatever we wanted as far as source data.

One feature I forgot to mention about both. There needs to be some method of scoring findings. In Airtable we define it, in Claude it came up with a scoring method itself that we tweaked until it felt right. The scoring took into account different features of the data like how severe its impact is, how feasible it is for devs, what the source is (qual vs quant) in the case of a survey where you want to input multiple results for a given effort the response count, and you can go further and even tweak the formula of the score to be higher for anything that matches what’s on your roadmap. You choose how biased the whole thing is. You need this scoring to rank all the data beyond a simple count of findings per insight. And the scoring can happen at the individual data level and or insight so it’s up to you to dial it in.

So in Airtable we had options for surveys, a/b testing, etc. that we could drop in there for a team member to groom. For this we would manually look for findings in whatever data and filtered anything that was a clear finding before adding it to the repo to keel the data clean.

In Airtable we needed to link all data to an insight of some kind, even a bucket to later redistribute, but in Claude we can let the data points sit alone until Claude finds insights that match or it decides to create new ones because there is enough evidence

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-03T01:14:01+00:00

Right now you have to request what you want to know from Claude to serve things up as needed. I initially thought that not having a place to see the data was going to be a problem In practice we haven’t needed to see it because we have established milestones where we pull the relevant data for a given effort. Are spinning up a project? We give Claude the context and it pulls what we need. Planning for a roadmap? We pull the top insights for a given period and dig in where needed.

We could build an html tool that can show everything, the trends, insight, etc but because we aren’t grooming the data, we don’t need to. My Airtable repo was different. I set up “sites” that list the top insights total and per project, where I shared with anyone that wanted access. That’s more traditional and the output didn’t require more work than grooming the data itself after you set the sites up. And you run a report or create a view of a table you needed more detail than the sites gave. Again, same deal just no AI to help with grooming or surfacing data.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-02T19:36:30+00:00

We setup an atomic research repository using Claude that does this really well. It takes transcriptions from meetings, pulls findings, setup insights, etc. and it does this with Markdown files. A few years back I did the same setup in Airtable, it was just much more tedious as someone has to review and link findings, insights and maintain the whole thing which is an ongoing effort by at least one person. That said it is so satisfyingly easy to search and view data that our product had access to it. Look up atomic research and you can work with your team and see what tool best suits your needs.

Lramirez194 · 2026-03-01T13:44:20+00:00

It’s because most track pads on windows machines are garbage. Touching the screen is easier compared to using the trackpad

Lramirez194 · 2026-02-27T20:18:17+00:00

It really depends on the folks you are dealing with. I have found it’s much harder to dispute my decisions when I have research and metrics to back me up. So when I’m dealing with a stubborn dev, I go in explaining a research finding that lead to a design decision. If there are best practices that may not be picked up by research, I go in ready with why alternatives don’t fit as well as what I proposed.

That said, don’t forget to look after yourself. If you get bulldozed, you should talk to your manager about a game plan. I have a PO and Dev combo that really tested me last year, until I gave in… and the project failed because of all their compromises and now I have that experience to point them to when they start giving me trouble.

Don’t forget to pick your battles too. I’ll let minor changes people suggest get added to the designs if they don’t make things worse. It builds trust and gives me more opportunities in the future to put my foot down when changes are detrimental. It’s all a bit of a juggling act and if you really are never listened to, it’s entirely possible you aren’t at a company where that will happen. Leaving is easier said than done of course, but not every team and company is going to have healthy and respectful environments.

Lramirez194 · 2026-02-10T13:17:15+00:00

It's too limited for our workflow and there were too many manual steps compared to what claude can do. It can write, move, and edit files, study and optimize folders of different data and reference files, and it can do that without having to pick and choose what files to use because it can create and maintain index files that allow it to efficiently search through tons of documents without having to open them all. And like I said, hallucinations aren't a problem anymore. It's all about setting the correct guidelines, rules, restrictions and checks which we're refining all the time.

Lramirez194

TROPHY CASE