Shahed Syed

Design Director

I build software that gives humans superpowers.

[Austin Vance @austinbv]

https://t.co/D9kxEUcU8O

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Part of what makes agentic coding work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There's value in failure. Don't let machines make the same mistakes.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

AX = Bounded non-determinism.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Quoth the raven: 67.

I asked my nephew, a massive Ravens fan, what their record was a few weeks ago. He hesitated. He could rattle off every Ravens stat you could possibly imagine. But simply stating his team's record threatened to cheapen his fandom to a trivial meme.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

"If we had no mirrors we'd all be clowns."

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Ask the LLM to explain a new codebase like a storybook.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I'm reading a physical book and I'm dreading copying my highlights into my digital notes.

I envision an app I can speak my notes into, and it shows similarly related ideas I've visited before.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

AI output is garbage. But that's the point.

It gives you a starting point for refinement.

It's easier to edit than to create.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I'm burning more tokens by speaking my prompts than typing.

Not because my prompts are longer, but because I write better than I speak.

When I write, I can think and edit my ask. Speech is rough and messy.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

The best design review: I scheduled a 1-hour session. We wrapped up in 15.

"Looks good, no questions, can't wait to see the next iteration."

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I speak wireframes into existence.

Current workflow: talk into superwhisper > Cursor prompts > clickable prototypes.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

My Indian friend was complaining about the lack of diversity in his kids' public school in NJ.

"Not enough brown kids?" I asked.

"No. It's all Indians."

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

People will talk about how we used to fill out forms on our devices.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Vanity metrics: I reached 1000 followers on LinkedIn yesterday.

The work doesn't stop. Onward.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I know this, but I need to keep reminding myself:

Talking to people beats sharing messages/documents async.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Some people are helpless when it comes to tech.

I used to wonder what it feels like to be so out of touch with technology.

---

My youngest was explaining brain rot words to me. I didn't understand a thing.

I get that feeling now.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

Bad design makes money and it’s that money, in part, that pays our salaries. That’s part of why they pay us: it’s compensation for frustration.

— @berkun

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I had a shocking dream. At the end of it, something felt off. So I replayed the dream again in my sleep.

It was AI generated.

But I wasn't watching an AI video in my dream. My brain decided that my dream reality itself was generated. Weird.

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

You think your prompt is long? Check out Claude Code's system prompt (recreated): https://t.co/ZJVRriwhnL

[Shahed Syed @dehahs]

I built a calorie tracking app.

I talk about what I ate, the Web Speech API transcribes it and gets sent over to OpenAI which calculates the calories and macros and logs it in Firestore.

I'm kind of blown away by how fast and how well this works even as a prototype.