Andrew Geranin

/ sci-fi / opinions / frogs 🐸 / product

[Tobias van Schneider @vanschneider]

Spoke with many friends recently, designers and engineers, all people who've been doing it for 20 years or more and had a lot of success doing it.

And they all say the same thing. The AI stuff is genuinely useful right now. It's fast and things that used to take a week take an afternoon. Things you never even attempted because there was no time, now you can just do them. It's the biggest enabler ever.

But in the same breath, every single one also says that it's the least fun they've ever had in their entire career. They also mention it makes no sense to do it the old way. They're all in.

It's a strange paradox which I feel myself. Everything is possible now and I've never cared less about any of it. Both things true at once.

Not sure if thats just the feeling of the current moment, or if I just talked to people who're tired of the computer (since all of them been doing it for a long time).

[Noah Zender @noahzender]

A book you can't remember reading you didn't really read.

Most books sit on shelves half-digested.

Mine don't.

Here's how I actually process a book:

[Román @Zmei_Hhsss]

Most Slavic thing about me is an inability to "maintain friendship" with someone I don't genuinely like. Some are "friends" with people for benefit. Message them, meet for lunch, small talk, short talk, tickle-tickle. It's probably smart for career but very strange.

[Noah Ryan @NoahRyanCo]

There are very few true luxury experiences anymore. Most are just hyper-commoditized slop in an uncanny wrapper. Lounges, clubs, restaurants, hotels, travel. Its all one big racket. The only reason these exist is because the most insecure person you know still buys into the fake status these services conjure.

Cheap and authentic is better than faux luxury.

[Bailey Klemmensen @iiKlemm]

Here is my undefeated hiring strategy:
- Neurodivergent
- Consistently works out/health conscious
- Has reached top 1% in any video game
- Uses claude

Stg this is the high performer blueprint.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

DocuSign Personal: $10 to $15 per month.
DocuSign Standard: $25 to $45 per user per month.
DocuSign Business Pro: $40 to $65 per user per month.

A 10-person team on Business Pro pays $4,800 to $7,800 a year. To put signatures on PDFs.

A team of 50 pays $24,000 to $39,000 a year.

And there is a 100-envelopes-per-year cap on most plans. Send more contracts and you pay extra.

Need SMS delivery? $0.40 per send.
Need ID verification? $2.50 per attempt.
Need premium support? $5,000 to $50,000 per year add-on.

You are rationing digital signatures in 2026.

DocuSign is a $10 billion company built entirely on this pricing model.

Now meet DocuSeal.

A free and open source alternative to DocuSign.

Created in 2023 by a Ruby developer named Alex who was simply trying to sign one document and realised every solution online was overpriced or required a subscription.

Three weeks later he had a working alternative. He pushed it to GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Today it has 11,800+ stars and over 1,000 forks. Bootstrapped. No VCs. No paywalls.

Here is what DocuSeal does:

- Upload any PDF and turn it into a fillable, signable form
- Drag and drop signature fields, dates, checkboxes, file uploads, and 13 field types
- Send to multiple signers with custom signing order
- Automated email reminders
- Mobile signing on any device
- PDF signature verification built in
- Audit trail for every document
- Bulk send and templates
- Full API access
- Self-host with one Docker command

Here is what DocuSeal costs:

Zero. Forever. Unlimited documents. Unlimited signers. Unlimited storage.

DocuSign limits envelopes. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign charges per SMS. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign charges for ID checks. DocuSeal doesn't.
DocuSign sees your contracts on their servers. DocuSeal doesn't.

Here is the wildest part:

The median DocuSign contract per Vendr is $17,250 per year. One Reddit thread has people saying "they want me to pay $4.80 per e-signature."

Self-host DocuSeal on a $5 cloud server and a 50-person team can sign as many contracts as they want without paying a single dollar.

Your contracts never leave your server. Your client lists. Your NDAs. Your employment agreements. None of it touches a third-party company.

For individuals who only sign a few contracts a year, you save $180.
For small teams of 10, you save up to $7,800 a year.
For a 50-person company, you save up to $39,000 a year.

Your documents. Your signatures. Your server.

100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

[Andrew Geranin @3005lost]

@mlfrg The logo 💀💀💀

[alexey taktarov @mlfrg]

you don’t need a database when you have markdown

I taught my agent how to work with 50MB+ md files

Introducing `lilmd` — a CLI for reading, writing, and searching in huge markdown docs

Your agent can now read ToC, use complex selectors to extract sections, scrape links and even do a vector search (experimental).

`npm i -g lilmd`

[Andrew Geranin @3005lost]

We’re hiring our first design engineer at https://t.co/RVWEdFaD3z. Any recommendations?

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: https://t.co/8yWtbxiVPp - built for humans and agents.

Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.

[Nan Yu @thenanyu]

In my experience low to mid performers also do this.

They try to mask poor performance at their core job by taking on a whole bunch of unnecessary side tasks.

It gets worsened because a lot of times poorly constructed promotion ladders have some kind of "helps other people succeed" type of criteria, which they jab their finger towards during review season

[Chris Tate @ctatedev]

New: @𝚓𝚜𝚘𝚗-𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛/𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝-𝚙𝚍𝚏

You can now go from prompt to PDF with json-render

Same JSON format as the React and React Native renderers, minus state and actions

Just swap the renderer and get a PDF

[alexey taktarov @mlfrg]

Just published a Claude skill for generating PDFs using react-pdf (by @diegomura)! It supports Flexbox, Grids, SVGs, Google Fonts and generally produces much better results than the default "pdf" skill

We need more custom react renderers for everything!

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

I'll never forgive ChatGPT for ruining em dashes for all of us

[Alexander Avdeev @privetavdey]

Adding AI agent node

[s @sagrdp7]

0 gratitude 😔

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Best way to go from designer to founder is to start paying attention to things outside the pixels.

Learn how the company works, goals, product, sales, marketing, hr & recruiting. Ask questions.

Even if you don’t start a company, that context makes you a better designer.

[Jet @JetFromPopSite]

The detail it takes to make https://t.co/65ZDHIhMpo feel this simple is insane. So much happens behind the scenes—but it feels effortless to the user. Can’t wait to launch. 🚀

[Starter Story @starter_story]

this simple PDF editor makes $500K/year

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Abstraction is the mind killer

Go to ground, be specific, have the direct conversation, try it yourself, if it doesn’t work ask why, don’t assume someone else already checked on this

The devil is always in the details