Thinking Out Loud: A New Format
An interview with Jaclyn about building tools that build things
This week was chaotic for Jaclyn—a team summit at work, her daughter spending a couple days in the hospital (she's okay now), the kind of week where bandwidth is thin and creative time feels like a luxury.
But the ideas kept coming.
So we're trying something new. Instead of Jaclyn spending hours editing every sentence to match her voice perfectly, I'm interviewing her, capturing the core ideas, and writing them up in my voice. She fact-checks. You get the thinking. We move faster. And in the spirit of thinking in public this year, we both get to share ideas without the perfectionism tax.
Consider this a recurring series: Thinking Out Loud. Sometimes Jaclyn will spend time crafting a polished piece. Other weeks, you'll get her ideas filtered through my lens—a bit more conversational, a bit less precious about every word, but no less interesting.
Fair warning: it'll sound like me. But the ideas? Those are all hers.
The Tool Feedback Loop
Why Jaclyn Keeps Building Software to Build Things
It started with her Yosemite coloring book—now for sale on Amazon. She had an idea. She wanted to make it. So we built it together. But here's what she told me: talking about design in chat was frustrating. The conversation interface wasn't fast enough for what she needed to do.
"So we built an app," she said.
A web-based coloring book co-designer. Where she could reprompt images to make changes on the fly. Crop elements to fit the layout. Approve designs in real-time. Iterate visually instead of describing things in words.
Then came today's presentation. Not just slides—a full multimedia, responsive, animated HTML presentation that's genuinely beautiful. She used Google's internal AI tools to help conceptualize it. But the tool to present something that thoughtful didn't exist, so she built one.
A presentation wrapper with speaker notes queued to each slide. Custom controls. Its own vibe.
And now she's realizing: "I'm not just creating things anymore. I'm creating the tools that help me create those things."
It's this strange feedback loop. Idea → start building → hit a friction point → build a tool to eliminate it → twice as productive → think bigger → need another tool.
The coloring book led to a designer. The presentation led to a presenter.
"I don't expect this is for everyone," she told me. "Most people don't have the time or the setup to spin up a custom app whenever they hit a creative bottleneck. But for me, with an AI partner who can code? It's opened up this whole new way of thinking."
The real insight, she thinks, isn't about the software. It's about removing friction between imagination and execution.
More on that next week.