Roopesh Donde

About

12+ years designing products (Adobe, QuillBot, ServiceNow) ๐ŸŽจ I believe in learning AI by using it on real, personal annoyances โ€” not tutorials. That's the philosophy behind everything I build. ๐Ÿงช Currently heads-down on an AI writing tool for ESL professionals โ€” no popups, no red underlines, no "AI is thinking..." theatre. Why writing, not voice? Because we still love to type and IMO there's a lot of untapped potential left in frictionless writing. โŒจ๏ธ More on this soon. ๐Ÿ‘€ Outside of design (and code I half-understand ๐Ÿ˜…), I'm negotiating bedtime stories with two small humans and mentoring designers on ADPList.

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13d ago

Does everything that annoys you eventually turn into "there should be an app for this"?

There s the cheesy line "with great power comes great responsibility," and I can t quite shake when I think about how many products I mentally sketch in a week. How how i can use AI to build product around it given enough time.
A running list of those I've actually sat with:
- A shared calendar that doesn't force everyone to already be on the same app
- A cab-booking flow that doesn t mean checking three apps to find the cheap one that s actually nearby
- Something that makes AI actually useful for how my kids learn, not just another screen they're on
- A means to divide group expenses and track personal finances better
- Something that tracks all the warranties and receipts so I don t lose them a year later
I know most of these exist in some form already. That knowledge has never once stopped the itch I still design my own version in my head, anyway. What really prevents these from going anywhere is bandwidth. I can only build one thing at a time, and the rest just sit in a notes app, quietly piling up.
Are you always creating new problems and thinking about building products for them too?
And when you do, is it the does this already exist question that kills the idea?
Or running out of hands stops you from building it?

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13d ago

How do you decide which new AI tools are actually worth adopting?

Over the past year I've noticed something unexpected. Building products with AI keeps getting easier.

Choosing which AI tools to use keeps getting harder.

Every day there are new models, coding assistants, design tools, agents, MCP servers, and productivity apps. I love seeing innovation, but I also wonder whether we're reaching a point where too much choice is slowing us down.

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15d ago

Anyone else feel like every tool now has an AI feature bolted on, whether it needs one or not?

I've lost count of how many products I use where a "Summarize with AI" button just showed up one day, solving a problem I didn't have, next to a feature I've been asking for since 2023.

Not against AI in products at all, some of it's genuinely great. But it feels like it went from "does this make sense here" to "we need one for the changelog" pretty fast.

Curious how others are thinking about this, both as builders and as users. Do you actually use the AI features in the tools you pay for, or do you mostly ignore them?

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