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I've been sending a lot of outreach messages lately as part of my job search, and pretty quickly ran into the same wall every time.
Writing a good, personalized message was never the problem. The problem was everything before it: finding the right contact, pulling context on the role or company, checking if I'd already reached out, then logging it somewhere so I wouldn't lose track.
There was a lot of repetitive work standing between me and writing the message itself.
So I started building a small dashboard (React, Vite, deployed on Vercel) to handle the deterministic stuff. It looks up contacts, pulls the context I need, and tracks everything in Notion automatically. I pretty much just do the writing.
Still early and still just for me, but it's already saved a chunk of time I used to burn on busywork instead of actually reaching out to people.
#ProductDesign #BuildInPublic #JobSearch
Amazing work!
Thank you!
Building your own dashboard to kill the repetitive lookup work instead of just grinding through it manually says a lot. Did you set out planning to build something, or did the busywork hit a point where vibe-coding a fix felt faster than doing the research by hand one more time?
Yeah it was definitely the latter. I was sending out so many cold emails but the entire process was such a bottleneck. I just slowly started building this dashboard on the side in hopes to speed things up.
Makes sense, cold outreach is exactly the kind of repetitive lookup work that eats a whole afternoon. Now that it's handling contacts and context automatically, roughly how much of your week did it actually free up, or is it still too early to tell?
Amazing work
nice love it
The real outreach bottleneck is usually research and context, not writing the message itself. Connecting contact discovery, enrichment, and personalization into one workflow is a useful product angle.
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Designing for two people, not just two users.
When I was designing this experience, I kept coming back to one question:
How can a product help two people intentionally grow together?
That led me beyond the usual engagement metrics.
The streak isn’t just a streak.
The daily check-in isn’t just a form.
The rituals aren’t just another feature.
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Good design doesn’t just solve interface problems. It shapes the behaviors that happen after the interface.
#ProductDesign #UXDesign #BehavioralDesign #DesignThinking #UIUX
The most important feature in my AI agent is the button that says "No."
Every agent I ship now lands its decisions in a queue before anything executes. A human approves, edits, or overrides. Every call is logged, including the ones the human changed — that log is how you find out what the model actually believes.
Clients ask if this slows things down. It does, by seconds. It also turns "we tried an AI agent and turned it off after a week" into "it's been running for months."
Here's how the escalation, override loop and audit trail are built: https://contra.com/p/OegbPPFg-agent-ops-console-the-human-review-layer-for-ai-agents
