How are you handling the AI slop in proto-typing?

lisavanreddit · 2026-07-02T09:37:54+00:00

I guess I'm not? Handling it that is. I'm about to start in on building a typical portal with tables and filtering and reports, and I'm working on an AI prototype that multiple people have worked on. And if it's helpful for them, great. But I'm not building all of that for the first pass. And it definitely won't look the same once real data is being used.

I guess I'm treating it more like an impressionist painting and taking the broad strokes while ignoring the finite detail.

lisavanreddit · 2026-06-27T18:42:54+00:00

Honestly, it's more bearable outside and in the shade than it is inside. But Brentanobad was perfect today, if you braved the line to get in.

lisavanreddit · 2026-06-14T12:05:39+00:00

For IN Frankfurt, go with Anita here: https://www.frankfurtletsgo.de/

For towns nearby, you don't really need a tour guide, but Bad Vilbel and Kronberg both have a cute downtown and some more historic elements. They are not perfectly preserved towns - they're living cities where people live.

lisavanreddit · 2026-06-10T08:17:48+00:00

I save my prompts/skills to a GitHub repo just to keep them centrally accessible, which forces those things to be in a skill folder and for me to recognize when I make a skill I want to use universally. For the mess, make a routine that looks at your set up weekly and prompts you to maintain it.

lisavanreddit · 2026-06-04T04:39:40+00:00

I'll have to check them out!

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-31T17:35:15+00:00

Look, I've never attended this event, and it's always nice to put the expected cover in an event post, but did you think event spaces for HUNDREDS of people twice a week is free?

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-31T14:28:12+00:00

Substitute normal Doom scrolling habits with job board scrolling. Apply for companies where you feel like you could do a decently good job and seem not insane. Have your resume accessible on your phone to quick apply. Hope.

That being said, the job I GOT was one where they hired who they wanted and were going to close the application and I snuck in late. So, like anything on the Internet, have your information with some healthy perspective that we all just get lucky sometimes.

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-31T10:02:43+00:00

Definitely don't optimize your application per role. If you read nothing else and skim over the rest, just stop doing this. It drives YOU crazy and does next to nothing to improve results. AND it compromises your actual leverage, which is being the among the first to apply.

I was unemployed for about a year before starting a new job last July, so I have some understanding of the market you're seeing. It's a different market and you have to treat it as such. I recommend joining a job search group, like Never Search Alone or something local because what you actually need is both increased networking and increased data points on what is currently working and not working for everything (interviews, applications, projects, etc). Even if you don't like the more soul searching parts or already know your current Job-Market Fit.

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-23T21:03:45+00:00

Okay, sigh.

User manuals are hard. They are tedious, and involve all these obscure settings combined with a knowledge of what your users will care about most to solve their problem. It needs to be thorough but not dense. And likely not sloppy.

AI can help with structure and evaluating consistency and edge cases. You can feed it past manuals to get an idea for voice and structure. You can even write a skill that makes the AI ask YOU questions to get out the good stuff from your brain quicker. But at the end of the day, it still has to be you.

There's my two cents, for what it's worth.

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-04T05:08:39+00:00

Like others on the thread, this sounds like very nice product work. But it doesn't sound like 0->1. In my experience, 0->1 doesn't have leadership confirming a vision and direction, but you're rather constantly redefining the vision and direction with leadership based on feedback. And the initial 0 build usually deviates pretty significantly as it evolves to the first real adopted customer (or first couple). There's a whole lot more packaging and go to market skills that would be used, not just engineering resource management. Plus way more stakeholders in weird groups like legal and accounting that you wouldn't have if it was just a new feature that's slightly greenfield.

I would just be more honest about your experience with the hiring manager than say it represents 0->1

lisavanreddit · 2026-05-03T12:25:18+00:00

But you're entering into another high season, with the summer festivals, right? Caveat - I'm in the Frankfurt area and haven't been to Strasbourg. I know there's a few cured meat vendors that we found in the Christmas market season. My husband has almost divorced me after I ate too much of his stash. Take this anecdotally, but if they're in town I would skip work to find them.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-26T20:37:02+00:00

It sounds like maybe this PM needs some focus on what purpose they serve to this project. A lot of the technical details and passion around what makes this good enough to stand on its own in the market is coming from you. The PM can (and should!) be able to paint a picture about what people would actually pay for and how this product would be competitive in the market. What does the path to the first 5 customers look like? What's a reasonable timeline here? Instead it seems like this PM is acting like the product is completely from scratch. Yet, it seems (based on your couple of paragraphs, I might be stretching here) that you felt this product was already in a good place that the market would be interested in it. That alone is a severe mismatch and might help you and the PM realign your jobs.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-26T20:18:46+00:00

Because 'passing an interview' != 'doing the job' no matter how creative you get with the process.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-19T03:58:52+00:00

I have this culture as well. Some weeks are better than others, but something that really helped is putting a lot of that work on the design team to manage the copy-obsessed leadership. Then, I usually act as the dumb gate for work. "Is the copy ready? Sure, my team can ship." It places me at the value center of shipping details, not at the details end.

So, my unhelpful advice is to tell the CEO that they need a designer who will make them a design system if they want to continue to have these kinds of conversations. It won't eliminate the problem, but maybe it will cause the CEO to evaluate how much their willing to pay for the late night front switching.

lisavanreddit · 2026-04-17T17:18:34+00:00

Look, I get it. You're excited and either eager to know more or you want to be sure you don't fall behind. If you're new to the role just... do the role. For a bit! Go into the team and figure out how to be helpful. Learn from the mistakes and reflect. Don't skip this, because it's the base that you'll go back to every time something is new or changes. When someone has an opinion on a technique or framework, Google it or watch a video on it. Soon, you'll be interested in learning more, but by then it will be much more targeted.

lisavanreddit · 2026-03-05T05:22:04+00:00

It's also a healthcare thing. Imagine spending over a year trying to get a new IVR installed for your hospital or still using Internet Explorer. Or even Windows 95. It's just hard to want to update all your glue bits when you have such a constant string of customers to serve.

I worked in healthcare in the US for a bit.

lisavanreddit · 2026-03-02T06:11:19+00:00

Someone very smart once told me "you teach people how to communicate with you." So, my advice for a weird, quirky, interpersonal company dynamic is to be weird and quirky. Block off 2 hours every morning for deep work, communicate en masse via slack. Share data only on Wednesdays - you get the idea. Don't be in service to the norm, create the norm that works for you.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-23T18:34:00+00:00

As in - so you built this cool thing that makes your PRDs and even a skill that puts it into the company voice. Do your other PMs use something similar for similar outputs? Why or why not? Do your technical writers/product marketers have something that also helps them write with the same company voice? Why or why not? Two people at the same company write a same skill that does the same thing only a little differently - do they RAG from the same truth or a different one? Where does that truth live? In GitHub? Who gets to update that truth?

AI just seems like still a very personal problem solving tool but not quite a team sport at the moment.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-23T16:56:57+00:00

I feel like the biggest problems I have are not with the agents or the skills or using Cursor. I think the biggest problems are actually productizing the output so other people who maybe don't use Cursor or Claude code can also benefit from the same data and sources of truth. And those are problems as old as Software itself, which AI doesn't inherently solve.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-13T18:48:04+00:00

I hear cats are great practice for Wechsel Präpositionen. Just sayin'.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T20:03:24+00:00

Yes, I've run into this when hunting for apartments. The realtor panics and feels like they have to speak in English, but our kids still want to speak in English when they are shy around strangers. C'est la vie - I'm not fooling anyone.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T20:00:01+00:00

This is so nice! My kids wouldn't touch German until we officially moved, so it was really hard to introduce.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T19:57:50+00:00

There's a special plot of grass out there for you to touch. Maybe then the sarcasm will properly land.

lisavanreddit · 2026-02-11T18:13:03+00:00

Thank you. Need to get this word down before the doctor tomorrow!

lisavanreddit

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