Making AI actually useful: Notes from inside Dust

Published on December 9, 2024

I recently joined Dust as a product designer, and I've been spending these first weeks wrapping my head around what we're building here. It's been interesting to see how different it is from what I initially expected .

What's the deal?

The tech world is pretty noisy right now, especially around AI. Everyone's promising to revolutionize everything. But what caught my attention here is the opposite approach - focusing on making existing tools work better together .

The interesting bits

The first thing that surprised me was how practical everything is. Instead of trying to be the next big thing in AI, Dust is tackling a simple but real problem: helping people find and use information more efficiently .

How it actually works

You know that feeling when you're jumping between different tools all day, constantly losing context? That's exactly what the team is trying to fix. The platform connects your existing tools and helps maintain context as you work . Nothing groundbreaking on paper, but it makes a real difference in practice.

Work in progress

The team is constantly tweaking things based on user feedback . It's refreshing to see this kind of iterative approach instead of big, flashy releases that don't really solve actual problems.

What's next?

Being new here, I'm still discovering things every day. What's clear is that there's a lot of thought going into how to make AI actually useful in day-to-day work, rather than just impressive in demos.

Random thoughts

It's weird being on the inside of an AI company right now. There's so much hype in the industry, but the day-to-day reality is much more about solving specific, practical problems than chasing the next big breakthrough.