Fractional design partner for startups. 👉https://xitter.gq/t.co/pKF0Ra5yII
Nashville, TN
Joined May 2009
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Every human being and animal is a different manifestation of the universe expressing itself and interacting with itself.
Holly Stewart retweeted
try this prompt in grok @bot:
Look through my work from the last two weeks: emails I sent, meetings, Slack messages, docs I edited, and anything else you can see.
List the tasks I did more than once, grouped by type. For each one, tell me:
- what the task is, in one line
- how often I did it
- roughly how long it takes me each time
- whether you could do it for me, partly or fully, and what you'd need access to
Then pick the top 3 to automate first, ranked by time saved, and suggest a routine or a dedicated bot for each.
Holly Stewart retweeted
It’s almost incomprehensible how wide the distance is between someone who’s working at the frontier with AI and basically everyone else right now.
The crazy thing is these lines are not converging, but only growing farther apart. If the curve of AI progress had leveled off, it would certainly have given most people and companies time to catch up or implement their workflows in a standardized way. The technology would have neutralized competitive advantage because everyone would be using it the same way.
But what’s happened is the opposite. The curve of AI progress is basically going vertical right now, which means if you had codified your processes 3-6 months ago you’re likely already behind again. Now imagine most companies that kicked into gear a year ago and thought that they were done. Even further behind now.
I’ve never seen a technology in my life and career that improves at this rate, which consequently means you need to upgrade your expectations at a similar rate. Our brains weren’t wired for this, and our organizational change management processes certainly weren’t either.
With any form of recursive self improvement, things just get wilder. It’s a time when you will need to be constantly reevaluating the things that didn’t work just a couple months ago to see if they now can be solved. AI native companies certainly have a strong advantage due to this right now, so now it comes down to can the bigger companies keep up. Wild times.
Holly Stewart retweeted
I believe the greatest gift you can give your kids is a calm home. It’s not the big house or the best toys that stick with them. It’s a place where they feel safe. Where mistakes are met with patience. Where voices stay low. Where hard conversations are always followed by repair. Kids absorb everything. Create peace and they'll carry it for life.
Holly Stewart retweeted
Straight-line careers are going extinct.
The most successful people will bounce between little experiments, stumbling into new ideas and income streams by accident.
Nearly all of my best results came from trying things that made no sense at the time.
Holly Stewart retweeted
watching ai design is like watching paint dry. don't watch paint dry.
start three designs and go for a walk instead.
Holly Stewart retweeted
Both sides of the AI design fight are right.
Interaction design is mostly patterns. AI’s great at patterns but the rest of design is feeling and that’s why so much of it still looks like slop.
I can’t code. Any engineer would look at my builds and call out my slop. But guess what, I can make way more stuff than I ever could before.
That’s how designers see AI design right now. And the people making it don’t care for the same reason, they're stoked they can do more now.
Everybody’s getting more capable at their own level right now and honestly that’s a good thing. But GOOD design is still the thing that separates it all.
Holly Stewart retweeted
Recently I hit the 1,000 daily artworks milestone.
Pretty fucking surreal tbh, showing up every single day has transformed my practice and completely changed my approach to the creative process.
I want to share some insights, grab a drink... it's a chunky one 👇
Holly Stewart retweeted
I suspect this explains some of the burnout I am hearing from my design/dev friends. Our brains respond to texture, variety, novelty – performing the activity engages these features in a way that instructing it to be done does not.
I think a big part of this is using LLMs makes every activity feel the same. Writing is Claude. Coding is Claude. Email is Claude.
All of the texture of the true nature of the activity is smoothed over, giving the brain very little to latch onto. xitter.gq/kevintwohy/status/1264…
Holly Stewart retweeted
4 months ago I cloned Airtable for a client in 5 days because they refused to pay Airtable $500/mo
months later, I’m still maintaining it
every two weeks it’s another edge case, a UI tweak, or a "quick 10-minute request." They’ve easily spent 10x more in headaches than the $2,000 they would’ve paid Airtable
just proving that SaaS isn't dead. Cloning isn't enough, if you want it to be same quality as original it becomes a full time job
and at this point isn't it easier to just pay?
Holly Stewart retweeted
A map of which country’s weather is most similar to where you live in America.
Holly Stewart retweeted
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI replacing creatives is that people really misunderstand what the creative process actually looks like.
There's this great metaphor in the book "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This!" where he compares creativity to washing a pig.
Imagine someone tells you to wash a pig by 3PM.
You've never done it before, so you improvise. The pig runs away, you get covered in mud, nothing works the way you expected, but eventually you figure it out. And just about when you're finally done, the client walks in and tells you they actually wanted a warthog and you start over again.
I fucking love this analogy because it perfectly captures why automating creativity with AI is so much harder than people realize.
We're watching AI get insanely good at generating everything at pretty much every creative medium. but there's this assumption that automating the output means automating the creative process.
And those are two VERY VERY different things.
Bc so much of creativity isn't actually about making things but about figuring out what the hell you're even supposed to be making.
It's about questioning the brief, connecting unrelated ideas, going down weird random rabbit holes, finding upon happy accidents, and sometimes realizing midway that you're solving the wrong problem entirely.
There is really no way to predict the sequence of steps at all. Sometimes you know exactly what you want, other times you don't discover what you want until you accidentally stumble into it.
and that is what makes creativity an extremely fascinating challenge for AI models.
AI is getting incredibly good at washing pigs.
But knowing which pig to wash, why you are washing it, or whether the pig even needs a bath? That is a whole different problem that I don't think we have solved yet.
Holly Stewart retweeted
Last year I shared the spin the chair test. Push back from the desk, turn around, spin back and notice what your eye lands on first.
I still do it on every screen we ship. These days it's mostly on products founders have built with AI tools.
They tend to fail it the same way. Everything's the same weight. Four buttons all asking to be clicked. Nothing tells you where to look.
So I spin, see what I see, and fix that one thing first. Usually it's picking the action that matters and letting the rest step back.
Try it on whatever's open right now. What did you see first?
Holly Stewart retweeted
Such a timely announcement.
Seconds before myself and others jumped on the trend of switching from Framer to custom.
This is what I needed.
The Framer MCP is here. Design, build, and update your site with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Grok. Without giving up Framer’s flexibility, reliability, and control. framer.link/mcp
Holly Stewart retweeted
One of the hardest things for designers with 20+ years in this industry might be recognizing how much of their thinking is still shaped by limitations that no longer exist.
For decades we’ve been trained to work within heavy constraints (which isn’t inherently bad). We limited ourselves to what’s technically feasible, what engineers can build, what budgets allow and what platforms support. We learned to compromise before we even explored the idea. It's a big part of being a designer.
Limitations still exist, but the ceiling moved upwards by a big margin. The doors are now opening in every direction and I don’t think we have fully grasped what that means just yet.
You can rethink almost anything from first principles. And you should. Step into any industry. Build software, hardware, whatever you want really.
What we need to learn today is unlearning our limits from the past decades. Far more is possible today than we’ve been conditioned to believe.
Holly Stewart retweeted
Underrated life advice: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed relationships. Rushed conversations. Rushed timelines. There's power in rejecting that trend. Pause. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.
Holly Stewart retweeted
If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.
