Divya's Weekly Notes #007
AI apps that make you work for it, Miro bought Reforge, and AI for good.
Things I couldn’t stop thinking about this week:
01: AI needs to get to the point. The answer to ‘when’s my next period’ shouldn’t be FOUR paragraphs.
02: The hard part used to be shipping. Now it's deciding what to ship.
03: I’ve been looking for the “AI for good” community. It seems smaller than it should be?
01 - AI needs to get to the point. The answer to ‘when’s my next period’ shouldn’t be FOUR paragraphs.
I’ve been testing various health tracking apps with a simple question: when is my next period? And the response has always been multiple paragraphs.
Every single one leads with caveats. Hedges its way through two paragraphs before landing on a date. I get why — liability, accuracy, education. But it all gets shoved into a wall of text, and the actual answer is buried.
This doesn’t feel like a hard problem to solve. Here’s what it could look like:
“Your next period is expected between April 8th – April 13th.” Based on your cycle history, temperature, and stress data. Predictions can vary.
—> And then present your user with prompts for further questions:
(Understand this prediction) (View cycle trends) (Learn more)
Give users the answer first. Let them choose the depth. The current approach seems to optimizes for liability over usability.
02 - The hard part used to be shipping. Now it’s deciding what to ship.
Miro acquired Reforge, and I find this move interesting.
On the surface, it looks like a whiteboarding app buying a PM education company. But if you look closer, Miro is betting that the bottleneck in the AI era isn’t building but knowing what to build. With Miro and Reforge, you pick a product from your backlog and spin it up to functionality in an afternoon now.
Knowing what to build means the friction is in the strategy, user research, prioritization, and the ultimate bet of “yes we should build this because we think it will make this impact”. Reforge is where PMs can go to do exactly that.
But there’s an interesting risk to note in this deal: Miro has had strong opinions on the tools it integrates with. Reforge on the other hand has been tool agnostic, which is one of the reasons people loved it. If Miro starts enforcing Reforge to work in its ecosystem with the existing integration partners...does that take away from the strength of Reforge with its user base?
03 - I’ve been looking for the “AI for good” community. It seems smaller than it should be.
I searched for an “AI for Good” newsletter. Didn’t find much.
I want to see how people are using AI — or teaching others to use it — for actual social impact. Education, elder care, underserved communities, climate, mental health, local government. That whole category.
Back in grad school, one of my favorite organizations was D4D: Data for Democracy — smart people lending their skills to nonprofits and community projects. I haven’t found the AI equivalent yet, but here’s what I’ve turned up so far:
Decoded Futures NYC — signed up, TBD
AI for Mankind — unclear if still active
If you know of others, send them my way.
Other things on my radar:
We celebrated our anniversary DC and had dinner at La Causa: a full Peruvian tasting menu where every course was tied to a specific region. The vegetarian menu was just as inventive which I love. I was obsessed with the cutlery and dishes custom designed to the course. Ugh, what a wonderful experience. I had to roll myself out of the restaurant, and I can’t wait to go back someday.
New notes next week,
Divya