anna machata

the thing people building cracked agentic work flows aren’t telling you is that if you’ve built your system right there should be very little friction bouncing from grok bot to claude to chat etc. just to figure out which you prefer

waiting for app store acceptance reminds me of waiting on college admission decisions

gm! made my first app store submission last night! 🎉

lucky girl affirmations: i count my blessings to have learnt coding from stack overflow, design from iterating by hand, and graduating high school before llms ✨✨✨✨

got my @function labs done this year and clocked in at 40% younger biologically than my calendar age (no peptides or fancy interventions used). my theory on contributing factors: - raised playing sports year round, including long distance running from young age which gave me a great health baseline for life - past 2 years doing consistent lagree (pilates but heavy weights) and regular long walks but not pushing my body hard every day of the week - PROBIOTICS (!) - was vegetarian from 16-23 and still prioritize a plant-based whole-food diet even though i eat meat regularly. - prioritizing mental health through meditation, gratitude and consistent 8 hours of sleep curious about others' bio ages / theories, esp women

new spiderman tldr: peter parker, a self-tortured isolationist tech bro, refuses to touch grass or form relationships because he MUST stay focused on “saving humanity” only to realize he does his best work (not accidentally morphing into spider demon) when he lets himself have a real life and friends. sf take notes 📝

insane things happening at @euphorialabsai rn. currently looking to connect with UGC growth operators and AI-enabled game/technical artists and animators ✨ dm me, tag your friends, let’s chat

heinous news for eloquent nerds

extremely effective use of desk space

all my non-tech friends that actually use claude (which is a small number) use it strictly for professional tasks and perceive it as quite corporate whereas “Chat” is their everyday personal companion that feels impossible to churn off of because it has all their secrets and lore

will always be bullish on devs/marketers that started working in games and then expanded to other products. games engage and retain users due to sheer pleasure of an experience. the game itself is rarely a direct solution to the real world issue a user faces. naturally this makes it much easier to ship a product with actual utility, because building something enjoyable within itself is the floor.

in this weeks episode of trying new things to grow my brain (brainmaxxing?): horse riding ! 🐎 fun fact, your motor cortex learns primarily through practice vs explanation. reading about a physical skill or memorizing coaching cues can help, but real improvement comes from actually doing. what new thing are you trying this week? want more ideas! – at Austin, TX

two things to check when a screen feels visually off and you can't name why: 1. is the alignment consistent or random? mixed alignment can be fine, it's only a problem when there's no logic to it 2. is one cta clearly dominating per page/modal? if two carry the same weight, the eye doesn't know where to land. that's why this new apple review prompt can read a little "off," like a prototype instead of final ui. (no obvious logic to left vs center alignment from user perspective, and "not now" button is more visually dominant than the star rating, which is the actual primary desired user behavior)

reading "healthy brain, happy life" by dr wendy suzuki and deeply enjoying the challenge of activating parts of my brain i don't always use. currently focused on finding art in my everyday and noticing composition, colors, spacing, etc. to improve my own visual design intuition. in the book she calls this a "visual cortex brain hack"- go to a museum (or just outside!), pick a piece of art you don't know, and sit with it for at least four minutes letting yourself get lost in it visually. fun ones from cdmx: