Weeknotes vol. 11: ‘Basically done.’

By Garrett, : Weeknotes

A hand holding a fountain pen drawing squiggles on a sheet of paper, on a dark green background

Another week! Lets see what happened, shall we?

Phil and I started the week with a Braindrop strategy meeting to revisit the scope of work and what comes in what phase, etc.

Braindrop for Mac is ‘basically done’, and if you make stuff on the computer then you know what that means: it’s working perfectly, aside from the few things on the procrastination list that will probably take another week or five.

And I’m using it full time to track the work to be done to finish it. 🤯 #inception

There’s also work behind the scenes worth shouting about. Matt continues to build out the test suite and nudge me to make technical changes that will make the app better in the long run, which I do and then he fixes. For instance, single table inheritance and converting archived from a boolean field to an archived_at date field.

If there was an award for the simplest, most bulletproof app ever to be built I would probably need to buy a tux.

On the design front, Christoph finalized marketing illustrations for the Braindrop landing page, which will be launching early next week. If you have a Mac and you’re insterested in being a beta tester, you’ll be able to sign up on the website.

end

More from the blog

  • A thick rope fraying and snapping apart mid-air as if losing a tug of war, with a teal arrow pointing one way and a small rocket flying the other, on a yellow background.

    Foomers vs doomers: skilled incompetence and the AI tug of war

    By Iain, : AI, Process, Hot takes

    foom-er, noun, an ironic malapropism playing on doomerism (AGI fatalists) and FOMO (hustle bros), used to describe techno-optimists. Reflects the onomatopoeic "slowly, then all at once" nature of exponential growth: “AI go foom.”A speaker at one of the many AI conferences that have sprung up like garments on your "clothes chair" (not clean, but not dirty enough to wash) describes the miracles of agent-assisted coding. Year-long rewrites finished in a fortnight, backlogs cleared, and hard problems dissolved by brilliant prompting and clever code harnesses. The audience of true believers laps i…

  • A businessman in a suit descends by a red-and-white parachute while typing on a laptop mid-air, drifting toward a small office building, on a pink background.

    Forward Deployed Engineers: AI’s hired guns

    By Iain, : AI, Strategy, Hot takes

    > The last mile of AI deployment is a real person, sitting in your office, learning your business, writing your plumbing, and making things work reliably. That will remain human for the foreseeable future.Google Trends shows a 5,000% increase in searches for "AI forward-deployed engineer" over the past five years. The curve stays flat from 2021 through mid-2024, then turns vertical. [Indeed data reported by Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-forward-deployed-engineer-career-job-openings-tech-2026-5) shows postings for the role rising from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 a year la…

  • A vintage mechanical sorting machine, cream cards each stamped with a person icon feeding in at the top and a chain of them spilling into a discard pile at the front, with an accepted and a rejected card icon to the side, on a green background.

    The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom

    By Iain, : AI, Hot takes

    > The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.If you've been involved in any part of the recruitment process, the last 18 months have been dispiriting, to say the least. Hiring became a closed loop. Employers adopted applicant tracking…

  • A brass balance scale weighing a plume of smoke in one pan against a solid iron weight in the other, on a blue background

    Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless

    By Iain, : Strategy, Process, Hot takes

    > The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon's work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.I recently wrote about [the GEO chimera](https://betterthangood.xyz/blog/geo-practice-versus-snake-oil/), the cottage industry promising to optimise your brand into AI answers. My argument was that the levers being sold mostly did not exist. Another part of the industry is selling gauges rather than levers. Estimates of the spend on …

  • A black bowler hat overflowing with a tangle of cables, plugs, and power strips, surrounded by floating app cards, on an orange background

    Another nice mess

    By Iain, : Strategy, AI

    Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it's you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data …

All blog posts

A playful, hand-drawn illustration of a group of characters holding up scorecards with the number ‘11’. They sit behind a table scattered with various other numbers.