@simoncorry Visual design will always be important, but it’s the “design thinking” that will make designers critical
“Almost none of this is really engineering, even though it looks like it from the outside”
Be careful out there. There's a lot of funny and magical math going on with incremental revenue reports from platforms.
Thankfully Opus work through mountains of Klaviyo and Shopify data to find the truth.
Two interesting details…
“Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations.”
“YouTube mentions have the highest correlation with AI brand visibility”
In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:
1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.
2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.
3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.
4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.
5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.
6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.
7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.
8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.
9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.
Agreed. Making something great or a long lasting, evolving career is a marathon. Let alone living a rich life full of time for family, friends and adventure.
I worry for all of the people starting fresh and getting swept up frenzy and urgency of today’s cycle.
The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.
And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.
Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.
This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.
I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.
Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.
With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.
My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.
There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.
Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.
I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.
I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.
Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.
i have seen enough proof now that using a coding agent is a deep skill
it's confusing because the people you see heavily using them produce horrible results
but that's because it's a skill! you can get better and the ceiling seems pretty high - this is very exciting to me
Creating one-off design tools and "toys" is a lot of fun when exploring branding or marks. It makes it easy to play with a lot of concepts really quickly.
@simoncorry The biggest thing I've noticed is the quality of writing output. On first pass it's really good, and I don't have to tell it to "remove the AI tells"
@tomjohndesign@BrinkleyRv@Starlink My favorite has to be Yellowstone. After that would be the 5 parks in Utah.
Most underrated is Big Bend, especially offroad primitive camping.
Most overrated is Great Smoky Mountains unless you're you get the firefly lotto in late May.
@simoncorry@krispuckett@claudeai@cursor_ai You need to give https://t.co/QR0oRyViOO a shot. Use all the models... They all can talk to each other and wait for spawned agents to finish up.
Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.
Available today at the same price.
Feels good to have a new agentic coding process...
1. Start with /grill-with-docs @mattpocockuk
2. Use Solo Term MCP to add sprint todos & scratchpad
3. Spawn an agent to implement the plan and open a PR
4. Parent spawns Claude & Codex agents to independently review PR
5. Spawn an agent to finalize changes
Step 1 is the only time I'm actively talking with the agent to get the process going.
Tactile controls and digital interactions blend into one cohesive interface, shaped through deep collaboration across engineering, interaction, graphics, typography, sound, and industrial design.