AI Revisited - part 2

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, joined this week by Jason Fried, CEO of thirty seven Signals. Now we talked a couple weeks with David about AI and this new energy around it, specifically how our programmers are using it internally. This week, I thought we would talk with Jason about his thoughts on AI and from a product perspective, where our thoughts are. So, Jason, before we talk about our products, let's maybe talk about just AI in general. Are you using this on a day to day basis, and what kind of use are you getting out of it so far? Yeah. You know, I use it for all sorts of different things. On the personal side, plenty of stuff. Business side, what I've been using it most for lately is actually as sort of an editor. Mhmm. Same. So I do a lot of writing. So I'm currently writing, for example, a newbasecamp.com homepage. And I wrote this piece. It's sort of a letter form, which is kind of how I approach these things. And I wanted to make sure that I was speaking really plainly and clearly, and I I thought I was, but I also wanted to really match it up with a lot of the language that our customers use very specifically. So we have this page on our site, basecamp.com/customers, which has about I think it's close to a thousand customer testimonials. Wow. And I use both Claude and ChatGPT. I kinda use them almost in competition with each other to kinda hone in on something because they each have their own style, and I don't like their house styles necessarily, but they can kind of somehow help me get somewhere that I'm comfortable with in a way that I like. So what I did was I pointed them both at the customer testimonial page and just said, like, internalize the language our customers are using, how they describe things, what they call things. Because for me, I might call a feature to dos, and and most people might call it tasks. Right. Now I noticed to dos, the tool in Basecamp is called to dos, but maybe people are calling it tasks, and maybe we should call it tasks. But I wanna make sure that what I wrote will land with more people and just land in their own mental model of what they're thinking about and how they're thinking about the product. So I asked it to internalize all the language and then read my letter and then make some suggestions for ways to tweak the language, not to tweak the letter or the tone, but make sure that I'm more aligned with how our real world customers speak about these things and call these things and name these things. So for example, I was using things like stay on top of things, …