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AI tools with the most product-market fit We asked my 1m+ newsletter subscribers “Which AI tool(s) would you be very disappointed to lose access to?” ChatGPT dominates. Half of respondents (50.2%) would be very disappointed to lose ChatGPT. Claude came in second, followed by Cursor, Gemini, and then Claude Code. It's interesting to see @meetgranola at #7, and @Lovable right after.
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4. Engineers are the outlier. For them, AI is doing just one big job: writing code, the core engineering task. Whereas for the PMs and designers, AI is helping them with supporting work. Farther down the list are jobs like documentation (7.7%), testing (6.2%), and code review (4.3%). These are the “boring but necessary” tasks engineers typically dislike. As you’ll see in the opportunities data below, that’s about to change. Engineers have accepted AI as a coding partner; now they want it to handle the tedious work that comes after the code has been written. One more pattern worth noting: engineers report the most mixed results on quality later in the survey (51% better but 21% worse, the highest “worse” of any role).
Much more in the the full analysis by https://t.co/d7J7A3RO7B
What exactly AI is doing for people, function by function Results from a large-scale AI productivity survey of my 1m+ newsletter subscribers (with @noamseg) 1. PMs are seeing the most value from AI tools to (1) write PRDs, (2) create mockups/prototypes, and (3) improve their communication across emails and presentations. Not so much to help them come up with roadmap ideas, run meetings, GTM, or user research synthesis. AI is helping PMs produce, but so far it lags in helping them think.
2. Designers are finding AI most helpful with user research synthesis, content and copy , and design concepts ideation. Visual design ranks #8. AI is helping designers with everything around design (research synthesis, copy, ideation), but pushing pixels remains stubbornly human. Meanwhile, compare prototyping: PMs have it at #2 (19.8%), while designers have it at #4 (13.2%). AI is unlocking skills for PMs outside of their core work (at least in the case of prototyping), whereas designers aren’t seeing the marginal improvement benefits from AI doing their core work.
Is AI delivering real productivity gains? What's the ROI so far? Hot takes abound, but data have been scarce. @noamseg and I took it upon ourselves to find out what’s actually happening on the ground by running one of the largest independent, in-depth surveys on how AI is affecting productivity for tech workers (1,750 respondents). We surveyed product managers, engineers, designers, founders, and others about how they’re using AI at work. tl;dr: AI is overdelivering. 1. 55% of respondents say AI has exceeded their expectations, and almost 70% say it’s improved the quality of their work. 2. More than half of respondents said AI is saving them at least half a day per week on their most important tasks. We’ve never seen a tool deliver a productivity boost like this before. 3. Founders are getting the most out of AI. Half (49%) report that AI saves them over 6 hours per week, dramatically higher than for any other role. Close to half (45%) also feel that the quality of their work is “much better” thanks to AI. 4. Designers are seeing the fewest benefits. Only 45% report a positive ROI (compared with 78% of founders), and 31% report that AI has fallen below expectations, triple the rate among founders. 5. Engineers have accepted AI as a coding partner and now want it to handle the more boring (but necessary) work of building products: documentation, code review, and writing tests. 6. n8n is currently dominating the agent landscape, though actual adoption of agentic platforms in 2025 has been slow. 7. A whopping 92.4% of respondents report at least one significant downsides to using AI tools. There’s definitely room for improvement. Here's the full report: https://t.co/2ra234FE8e Inside: - What exactly AI is doing for people, function by function? - Where are the biggest opportunities for AI startups? - Which AI tools have product-market fit? - The downsides of AI productivity - Bonus: The state of agentic AI: promise outpaces practice - What this all means - Appendix: Who took this survey
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RT @brainmirrorai: Current AI guardrails don't work, and we've just been lucky that AI agents aren't capable enough yet to do real damage.…
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RT @clairevo: Want to AI-pill your team? Give them time off to vibe code 🙃 That's exactly what @BrianGreenbaum at @pendoio did over paren…
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