Simon Willison’s Weblog

The single most impactful investment I’ve seen AI teams make isn’t a fancy evaluation dashboard—it’s building a customized interface that lets anyone examine what their AI is actually doing. I emphasize customized because every domain has unique needs that off-the-shelf tools rarely address. When reviewing apartment leasing conversations, you need to see the full chat history and scheduling context. For real-estate queries, you need the property details and source documents right there. Even small UX decisions—like where to place metadata or which filters to expose—can make the difference between a tool people actually use and one they avoid. [...]

Teams with thoughtfully designed data viewers iterate 10x faster than those without them. And here’s the thing: These tools can be built in hours using AI-assisted development (like Cursor or Loveable). The investment is minimal compared to the returns.

— Hamel Husain, A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products