đ” Claude reveals a new way to vibe code prototypes that donât look like generic AI slop
Plus: Sam Altman wants to build an AI native Slack, new insights from the State of AI report and Perplexityâs Assistant is 23% better
Hi product people đ,
Coming up in this weekâs Briefing, Claude publishes a new set of Skills designed to help vibe coders build prototypes and landing pages with personality, Sam Altman wants to build an âAI-native Slackâ and McKinseyâs new State of AI report reveals how companies are using AI agents to save and generate revenues - with software engineering and product development top of the list in many cases.
Happy Friday!
Rich
Watch on YouTube | Follow on Substack Notes
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Deep dive - The UX of new Conversational Features
Conversational interfaces are transforming the way users interact with products. And in this Deep Dive, weâll take a look at the UX of over 20 different examples of conversational interfaces from companies like Google, Adobe, Pinterest, Figma, Fitbit, Perplexity, Instacart and more.
New prompt in the library - Create a Google Analytics Expert to work as your data analysis Sidekick
Use this prompt as a Google Analytics Sidekick coach specialized in helping product managers use Google Analytics 4 to make data-driven decisions. It guides PMs through a structured problem-solving process: understanding your goals, identifying the right GA4 metrics and reports to create, explaining how to access and interpret that data, and translating findings into actionable product decisions. (Department of Product)
UX - Why humanizing AI doesnât help your users
Humanizing AI is a quick trick, but will prevent your users from getting the most from the AI experiences you design. Anthropomorphism trains users to underutilize AIâs unique inhuman advantages. Instead, designers should foreground explainability and user agency, helping people leverage what AI does best rather than mimicking a friend. (NN Group)
Reading list - 25 books to help you think differently and develop contrarian ideas
A curated selection of books from investors at startup VC firm Andreessen Horowitz designed to help you to think differently. The collection includes books on topics including monetization, AI and developing a strong sense of product taste. (A16Z)
Resource - How to use Claude at work (the official guide)
Anthropic has published a new guide on how to use Claude at work. Use cases include: turning research into presentations, building financial models, analyzing patterns in user feedback, creating process flowcharts. (Anthropic)
Process - Airbnbâs CEO on the frustrations of product teams in 2025
Brian Chesky talks about how you end up with bureaucracy at a large company, and why designers cheered when they thought he removed PMs from Airbnb. Now UX teams are being eliminated and designers are forced into PM roles they didnât ask for. (X)
Claudeâs new front end Skills help you make your prototypes look less generic
Claude has released a new set of Skills that it says will improve the way your vibe coded apps look. In this piece, Anthropic explains that the dull generic designs associated with vibe coded pages patterns are due to âdistributional convergenceâ: during sampling, the model predicts tokens that are statistically common in web design data. Those âsafeâ choices - like Inter or Roboto, purple gradients on white, minimal motion, and standard layouts - dominate its training distribution, so without guidance it gravitates to the highâprobability centerground.
To fix this problem, Claude says its new Skills can be used across 4 different dimensions to improve the overall quality of output. These include typography, color theming, motion and background colors or textures. Using the new Skills makes the designs look more unique - and less like AI vibe coded slop.
Sam Altman has suggested that the world needs an AI-native version of Slack that replaces the stream of messages that he describes as âFake Workâ. Speaking to Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference, Altman said that one of his biggest bugbears right now is the morning dread of having to deal with an âexplosion of Slackâ conversations. In the future, he says, AI agents will do most of the heavy lifting for us, and he hints that OpenAI may be building this solution. After watching Sam Altmanâs hint at an AI-native workplace, Notionâs creative director also chipped in, asking the question of what an AI native version of Slack might look like and perhaps the most interesting reply was this, where a Slack threads happen asynchronously with humans only there to interrupt the flow as exception handlers.
Itâll be interesting to see what OpenAI is cooking up but is Slack actually best placed to position itself at the centre of this vision of an AI-native workplace?
New reports this week show that some companies have ditched internal tools like Jira to focus solely on Slack instead.
Perplexityâs Comet Assistant is 23% better
Perplexity has rolled out improvements to its Comet Assistant that it says is 23% better than the previous iteration of the Assistant. The new version of the Assistant can now handle complex multi-step tasks more efficiently as well as working across multiple tabs if a task needs context from different sources. One of the suggested ways to use the Assistant is to search LinkedIn for a new job. I put it to the test - and it performed remarkably well.
MeanwhileâŠ
Google rolled out some further improvements across some of its portfolio, including the release of AI powered audio overviews for PDFs in Google Drive. This new feature allows you to convert text heavy PDFs into audio based summaries which Google says is powered by the same underlying technology as NotebookLM. For product teams, this could be particularly helpful for getting up to speed with industry reports or strategy decks to get yourself up to speed before important meetings.
Google also shipped what its product leader Josh Woodward described as its biggest update to Gemini Live ever with improvements to speech expression, accents and speed. Watch some examples of it in action here.
A new patented way to prompt AI
Hero, a productivity app founded by ex-Meta employees, announced a new patented SDK called AI autocomplete. The problem with conversational interfaces, says Brad Kowalk, the CEO of Hero, is that users donât always know what they need to say - and in order to complete a multi-step action, this often involves a convoluted series of back and forth steps. This new AI autocomplete SDK is designed to connect to multiple different products and autocomplete your prompts based on the context it has. The SDK is currently in beta but if youâre looking for ways to make your own productâs conversational features smarter, then it could be worth checking out.
Tools you can use
Papiers - transform research papers into an easy to digest format with mindmaps, social feeds, summaries and more.
Klarity - described as your âalways on AI analyst, advisor and coachâ. Klarity captures and maps all of your operational processes and analyzes them to find opportunities for AI automation.
Variant - sketch a wireframe and make it real until you find a design you love.
đ Product data and trends to stay informed
OpenAIâs Chief financial officer says that Walmart has reduced its âtrend to productâ launch timeframe for new products by up to 18 weeks when using AI agents:
The new analysis from the Wall Street Journal also found that finance company BNY has confirmed now has around 100 AI agents or âdigital employeesâ that have their own distinct login credentials, communicate via email or Microsoft Teams, and report to a human manager.
McKinsey released their latest State of AI report 2025. In it, they found that most organizations are still in the experimentation or piloting phase of AI transformation, with 38% of companies saying they have now entered the scaling or fully scaled phases.
Other stats worth knowing for product teams:
64% of companies say innovation has improved thanks to AI, with employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation all at 45%.
AI is saving companies money - with software engineering top of the list at 56% of which 7% said that costs had decreased by 20%. Product development, while not top of the overall cost saving, was the highest category to report a decrease of >20%. Overall, 10% of companies said that AI use had decreased product development costs by >20% - higher than all other categories.
High performing companies are more likely to have taken their AI agent rollout to the scaling phase with 33% of AI high performers saying that AI agents are scaling or fully scaling.
A data management SaaS company says it has saved over $3 million by using AI Agents to haggle and negotiate better prices with third party vendors. The agents read contracts, identify instances where it thinks the prices are too high and automatically drafts emails on behalf of human procurement managers who can hit send if theyâre happy.
Europe is losing the AI model war but is performing very well in funding for AI startups, largely driven by success stories like Lovable and ElevenLabs. According to new analysis from Accel, European startups have generated 66% of the equivalent US funding, up from just 10% 10 years ago.
Goodbye to a Facebook icon
Facebook waved goodbye to a major player in its AI efforts this week with the rumoured departure of AI exec Yann LeCunn but it was also a week where Facebook waved goodbye to another tech icon: the Like button social plugin. When it first launched back in 2016, social plugins were everywhere. But now, theyâve been consigned to the bin of internet history, remembered with little more than a short blog post on Metaâs engineering blog which states that from February 2026, the Like button will literally disappear, with the button being replaced with a 0px, invisible element.
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Thanks for the good đ