u/BankZan

Our policy admin still runs through a 3270 front end and will for years, which is fine, it works. what isn't fine is that every process touching it is a person typing, and we have people whose job is rekeying between the emulator and a web portal. The vendor supports hllapi and our emulator exposes it, so there's a scripted path, but the people who wrote our existing hllapi scripts retired and nobody left here wants to own that.

So the question is what a team would start with today. rpa is the obvious answer and uipath's terminal activities do work through hllapi, which puts us back on the same dependency with a friendlier wrapper. blue prism similar. Askui came up as a different approach, operating the emulator screen the way an operator does rather than going through the api, with the task written as plain steps, which would mean it doesn't matter that our emulator is old. sounds fragile to me for a green screen where a field position is everything, and i might be wrong about that.

Is anyone automating a terminal front end without hllapi, and is it stable enough to run unattended?

I build and maintain the automations for a clinic group across five sites. Thing is the clinical system is on prem, the vendor has no api yet, and the answer since last year has been that it's on the roadmap. so therapists retype session notes into the patient record by hand, close to an hour a day each. i built the bridge in uipath and parts of the app expose proper ui automation selectors and that leg is fine. the notes screen is a rendered surface where selectors are useless, so that half runs on cv activities with image anchors. it works until the vendor ships a patch, then the anchors drift and i'm in there rebuilding. third time this year.

What i'm trying to work out is whether anything in this category genuinely survives a patch cycle or whether we all just accept the rebuild as the running cost. Power automate desktop hit the same ceiling when i tested it, same dependency on how the screen looked when you recorded. Askui came up because the task is written as plain steps resolved at run time rather than a recorded path or a stored anchor, so in theory a moved button isn't a break. i haven't put it against our patch cycle yet so that's still a claim rather than a result. one hard constraint either way is that patient data can't leave our network, which rules out anything cloud-only.

For anyone automating an app with no dom and no api, what's your maintenance cadence after a vendor update, and has anything reduced it?

So I tested all three for about 3 months across 4 clients and i decided to share what i found because every comparison article i read was written by their marketing teams. Heygen was easiest to get moving and the language versioning is legitimately good, we shipped the same explainer in four markets in an afternoon. Arcads sits closer to what a performance team wants since the whole library is built around ad reads, though you're picking from their actors so the face changes between campaigns and that hurt recall for the smaller client. Argil was the opposite tradeoff, the clone setup meant one specific person appears in everything. each one of them is great at something specific but we still can't decide on one.

What are marketers running in house for their ai videos? How did it hold after 3-6 months? Thanks in advance!

Every month or so someone here posts the big European alternatives list, and it's one of the best things about this sub. I've saved every version, but I went back through it recently and was surprised to find that a number of the companies on it aren't European anymore. They were bought. A European team builds something great, it gets traction, and then American money shows up and buys the whole thing before it ever grows into a champion of its own.

I don't really blame the founders, the number on the table is life-changing and the European growth capital to stay independent mostly isn't there. It's not a moral failing, but the result is we keep celebrating "European champions" that quietly have a US parent by the time we've finished recommending them.

So what I care about now is who's still standing and structurally likely to stay that way. Spotify, Workmotion, and sap never changed flags, Adyen is still dutch, Ovhcloud and Hetzner never took a US parent, Mistral is still founder-controlled french. There's a next wave still independent too, Scayle on the commerce side is still German-owned under the zalando umbrella, Argil is still French, among many others in my EU list.

Now I need help rebuilding the list with that one filter (company still European and hasn’t changed flags). What are some European alternatives in any given industry you have on your list? and is this the right direction we should take or it doesn’t matter if a company switches locations later? Thanks!

Vor ein paar wochen hatten wir bei uns die beförderungsrunde, so eine kalibrierung, und da ist was aufgekommen das ich seitdem nicht mehr loswerde. zwei leute, quasi identische reviews. ähnlicher output, ähnliche ergebnisse, beide wirklich gut. aber im raum kam die eine person immer wieder vor und die andere kaum, und das hatte nichts mit der arbeit selbst zu tun. es ging nur darum wie sichtbar die arbeit für die leute war, die im raum die entscheidung getroffen haben.

Ich hab da lange drüber nachgedacht und ich glaube viele firmen haben aus versehen drei verschiedene klassen von mitarbeitern gebaut.

Klasse 1 sind die ganz normalen leute im büro. die kriegen sichtbarkeit über präsenz. du siehst sie, du triffst sie in der küche, du erinnerst dich zur beförderung an sie weil sie das ganze jahr physisch da waren.

Klasse 2 sind die remote-leute. eine der beiden von oben arbeitet komplett remote über Workmotion aus einem anderen land und macht richtig gute arbeit. aber ihre sichtbarkeit sind im grunde ihre meetings. wenn sie eine woche auf keinem call ist, hört sie für die führungsebene irgendwie auf zu existieren. präsenz wurde einfach gegen einen kalender getauscht.

Klasse 3 ist die, für die ich bis vor kurzem kein wort hatte. das sind die leute, deren arbeit von software fast als nebenprodukt aufgezeichnet und sichtbar gemacht wird. ein großer teil unserer storefront- und shop-arbeit läuft über Scayle, das crm loggt den rest, und manche kontakte werden über andere tools dokumentiert und angereichert bevor überhaupt ein mensch sie anfasst. für jeden der in diesen systemen arbeitet gibt es eine lückenlose schriftliche spur von fast allem was er gemacht hat. keiner von denen wollte sichtbar sein, die sitzen halt zufällig in den teilen der firma die eine papierspur hinterlassen.

Und genau das ist der punkt. in dem beförderungsraum war die person am leichtesten zu besprechen, über die es die meisten digitalen belege gab, nicht unbedingt die beste. die büro-person hatte präsenz. die dokumentierte person hatte belege. die stille remote-person die konzentriert arbeitet und keine calls erzeugt hatte weder noch, und sie hatte vielleicht 8 sekunden redezeit. ich glaube nicht dass da jemand böswillig ist. manager bewerten das was sie sehen können, und software entscheidet inzwischen was sie sehen können.

Was ich nicht einordnen kann ist ob das einfach die neue realität ist oder ein echtes gerechtigkeitsproblem. früher war es anwesenheit im büro, heute ist es die menge an digitalen spuren. vielleicht hat sich nur das medium geändert und im digitalen zeitalter war das eigentlich schon immer so. oder wir verbringen die nächsten zehn jahre damit die leute zu befördern die zufällig auf den am besten vermessenen plätzen sitzen, während die besten in den leiseren rollen übergangen werden bis sie gehen.

Würde mich interessieren wie andere das sehen, gerade leute die remote arbeiten. ganz ehrlich, werden bei euch die effektiven leute befördert oder die sichtbarsten?

I am looking for a tool to make a number of AI influencers for a couple instagram niche pages. I will be creating several characters so I need something affordable to not break the bank. I trialed Argil, Higgsfield, and HeyGen so far but haven’t committed to any of them.

Anyone here can recommend the best out of these 3? Thanks!

I’ve been debating starting a faceless YouTube channel or several ones and try to eventually monetize them with brand deals + some affiliate marketing offers but I’m a complete beginner when it comes to video editing and how to make videos in general. A lot of people claim it’s easy work so they can sell you their bs course but the process is really overwhelming…

I decided I wanna go for a news channel and what I came up with right now is a combination of Perplexity and Grok to source news, Claude for scripting, and Argil + Adobe premier pro to generate/edit the videos. What I keep thinking about is the number of hours I need to dedicate to this, it will probably take me months to see a glimpse of success, so I really need feedback from people who are doing it right now.

Has anyone had any luck with running faceless channels on YouTube passively, or the whole thing is just not worth it in 2026?

PS: please do not try sell me your course. Tnx

I'm trying to move our talking-head course segments off studio filming and every policy change means rebooking a shoot and re-recording, and I can't keep doing that for content that changes quarterly. So I'm after a script-to-video setup where i can update a line and re-render instead of re-filming, and there are more options than i expected. Synthesia is the one everyone names, big avatar library, built with training in mind. Colossyan is also aimed squarely at L&D with scenario and branching features. Argil does the same write-a-script-get-a-presenter thing with a focus on a consistent reusable avatar. they overlap a lot on the surface, so it's kinda hard to tell them apart from the marketing pages.

So before i burn a week on free trials, what are folks here using to turn course scripts into engaging videos? Thanks a lot!

I sell handmade ceramics on etsy and i've accepted that the growth is in video now, etsy's explore feed plus tiktok and reels pointing back to the shop. The issue is i hate being on camera and i'm not good at video editing so i need the easiest possible way to make decent video without either.

So I've been going through the options and they do pretty different things. CapCut is the free default, fine for stitching clips and adding captions if you already have footage. Creatify and Arcads generate ad-style clips from a product link or a hook, more geared to paid ads. HeyGen and Argil are avatar-based, you write a script and get a presenter talking so you never have to film yourself, then you drop your real product footage around it. What I can't tell from the marketing pages is which of these is actually quick for a non-editor making a few videos a week for their shop.

What are you all using for shop video, need something worth it for a handmade brand. Thanks!

I sell handmade ceramics on Etsy and i've accepted that the growth is in video now, going for a combo of etsy's explore feed plus tiktok and reels pointing back to the shop. The issue is i hate being on camera and i'm not good at video editing so i need the easiest possible way to make decent video without either.

So I've been going through the options and they do pretty different things. CapCut is the free default, fine for stitching clips and adding captions if you already have footage. Creatify and Arcads generate ad-style clips from a product link or a hook, more geared to paid ads. HeyGen and Argil are avatar-based, you write a script and get a presenter talking so you never have to film yourself, then you drop your real product footage around it. What I can't tell from the marketing pages is which of these is actually quick for a non-editor making a few videos a week for their shop.

What are you all using for shop video, need something worth it for a handmade brand. Thanks!

I spent about 8 weeks vibe coding an app with cursor and a LOT of coffee, and it actually works. Now I need to show it to people. i've never made a video in my life and I'm not about to start filming myself narrating my own app.

So I've been digging into what people actually use and it splits into two camps. Arcade and Guidde record your actual screen and turn the clicks into a walkthrough or narrated demo, good when the point is showing the UI. HeyGen and Argil go the avatar route, you write a script and get a presenter-style video without filming anyone, suited for the "here's what this does and why" intro. So one shows the product, the other explains it, and for a launch you kinda need both? Idk.

How did you all handle the demo video for your app? Do you just ship basic screen recordings or do you do it yourself with AI tools? Thanks!

So i’ve been trying to fix something at our b2b saas that i believe a lot of product marketers deal with. We kept losing deals to the same two competitors and nobody could actually say why with evidence. I mean the raw material was all there as we record every sales and renewal call but the problem was that competitor intel was buried across hundreds of hours of recordings and nobody's actual job was to mine it.

I've been looking at how marketing teams operationalize this and the tools split into a few camps. Gong has competitor trackers that flag when a name comes up on a call, more sales-coaching oriented. Klue and Crayon are dedicated competitive-intelligence platforms, strong on structuring battlecards and pulling from public sources, though the call-signal side depends on what you feed them. BuildBetter sits on the call-analysis side, tagging competitor mentions and objections out of the recordings themselves. They're solving different slices, some start from the market and some start from the calls, and I'm honestly not sure yet which order is right for us.

How are PMs here handling this? and does anyone trust the auto-tagged competitor mentions or do you still QA them by hand?

Guten Tag zusammen,

kurz vorweg, ich bin nicht aus Deutschland, hab aber hier meinen Master gemacht und bin dann geblieben. (Sorry übrigens falls das holprig klingt, Deutsch ist nicht meine Muttersprache, ich geb mir Mühe.) Ich mag das Land ehrlich gesagt, die Art wie hier Dinge ordentlich gemacht werden. Also dachte ich, hier gründe ich mein Ding.

Produkt steht, funktioniert soweit, und jetzt brauch ich halt Kunden. Und überall online liest man dasselbe: Liste bauen, Kaltmails raus, nachfassen, skalieren. Das amerikanische Standard-Playbook. Also fang ich an das aufzusetzen und bin ehrlich gesagt schon halb stolz auf meine kleine Tabelle mit 200 Firmen.

Dann erzähl ich einem Bekannten davon, der Anwalt ist, beim Bier, eher so nebenbei. Und der guckt mich an und sagt: lass das mal lieber. Kaltakquise per Mail an Firmen ist hier nach UWG ohne vorherige Einwilligung abmahnfähig. Ich hatte den Finger quasi schon auf "Senden". Und in dem Moment ging mir auf, worauf ich mich da fast eingelassen hätte. Nicht mal die DSGVO war das Problem, sondern dass mir irgendein Wettbewerber oder Abmahnanwalt einen teuren Brief schickt, bevor ich überhaupt meinen ersten Kunden hab.

Ok denk ich, gibt doch inzwischen hundert KI-Tools für Akquise, eins wird die rechtliche Seite schon abdecken. Also schau ich mich um. Und das ist ehrlich ziemlich ernüchternd. Fast alles kommt aus den USA und ist dafür gebaut, tausende Mails rauszuballern, UWG und DSGVO interessiert die null. Und die großen Namen, von denen letztes Jahr noch alle geschwärmt haben, sind entweder halb implodiert oder waren am Ende mehr Marketing als Produkt. Ich sitz also da und merke, dass die ganze Kategorie für einen Markt gebaut ist, der nicht meiner ist.

Und jetzt hänge ich ehrlich gesagt fest. Ich hab ein Produkt, ich hab Firmen die ich erreichen will, und irgendwie trau ich mich nicht mehr, überhaupt irgendwas anzufassen, aus Angst dass es hinterher teuer wird.

Also ganz ehrlich gefragt an die, die hier schon länger selbstständig sind: wie kommt ihr eigentlich an eure ersten Kunden, ohne euch rechtlich angreifbar zu machen?

**Edit: Danke euch allen für die vielen Antworten und den Input, hat mir echt geholfen, das Thema besser zu verstehen. Ich schau mir jetzt ein paar deutsche Tools an, die ich über LinkedIn gefunden und hier im Sub gesehen habe, unter anderem Venta AI, Dealfront und Salesviewer, und teste was für mich funktioniert. Melde mich, wenn ich mehr weiß.

Hello folks, i’ve been doing continuous discovery at a b2b company for about two years now and i can run about 6 or 7 a week no problem. it's the transcribing, tagging, pulling themes, then turning all of it into something a PM will actually read instead of skim is what i’m finding difficult right now… For a while my whole process was a spreadsheet and a highlight reel but once we crossed maybe 30 sessions a month the manual coding just fell apart. Over the last few months i tested a handful of tools to take the synthesis load off (Dovetail, Buildbetter, Condens…) and where i landed is a bit of a hybrid, one tool for the messy first-pass theming and a lighter repo for anything i need to cite later. not perfect but it roughly halved my analysis time.

How do the rest of you handle this at volume? Am i the only one drowning and wasn’t posting about it until today?

I don't really know how to put this into words but i will try.

For about 3 years I told my GP I was exhausted, the kind where you sleep 9 hours and still feel like you are wading through wet sand by 11am. My hair was coming out in the shower, my nails kept splitting, my heart would race walking up the stairs, and yet every time i get the same answer. Your bloods are normal, you are a busy mum and It is probably stress. Nobody ever looked further. I started to believe I was just weak or that this was what 36 felt like and everyone else was coping better than me.

Eventually I got so fed up I paid for a private panel myself. Felt ridiculous doing it like I was being dramatic but the results came back and my ferritin was 11, ELEVEN. My iron stores were basically empty and my thyroid antibodies were high and my B12 was sitting right at the floor. And guess what, it wasn't just stress like they always told me, it was all there in tests nobody had bothered to run.

If I had not been able to afford it, I would still be sitting there being told I am fine. I have since learned how many women have this exact story. Dismissed, under-tested, told it is anxiety or hormones or just life, until they either give up or go private.

so for the women who eventually got a real answer, what was it, and what finally made them listen to you. and if you are being told you are fine but you know you are not, please push for finding the actual numbers, do not settle for less.

Hello, we maintain a fairly large internal desktop app, mostly WPF with a chunk of older WinForms still hanging around, plus a few third party grid and charting controls the business depends on. Automating UI tests against it has been a real pain, FlaUI and WinAppDriver are fine until they hit the custom controls and the third party grids, where there is no clean automation ID to grab, and then we are either fighting the accessibility tree or falling back to coordinates that break the next release.

So i thought I would ask here before I sink another quarter into maintaining this. What are people here using for desktop UI automation now. Are you still grinding it out with FlaUI and WinAppDriver or gone commercial with TestComplete or one of the newer vision based ones like Askui that work off the screen instead of the control tree? Would be really helpful to hear your experiences!

I’m an SDR at a big tech company you'd probably recognize, and claude has quietly been doing the visible 80% of my job for almost a year now.

The way it works is i've got claude hooked into a few tools through MCP, so it pulls the target accounts off a list i keep, runs each contact through Fullenrich to get the actual emails and direct numbers, sorts out who's even worth bothering, and drafts the first message in my voice off a prompt i've been tuning since last summer, and drops the whole thing into Hubspot. I read them, fix maybe one in five, and send. the part the whole team assumes eats my entire day is a fifteen minute review now.

What i bring is the one good line per call, the read on whether a prospect is annoyed or just busy, and knowing when to ignore claude completely and just pick up the phone. that's the 20% it can't do yet, aka human judgment and taste. I’ve hit my quota every month and got bumped to senior in the spring. my review literally said "sets the standard for prospecting rigor on the team," lol, i have not personally done anything rigorous since last year. i got good at wiring tools together and editing fast, that's it.

If claude can do 80% of my job and i got promoted twice while it did it, then maybe the wiring was the actual skill the whole time and the grind was never the point. Thoughts?

Bit of a niche one but i reckon some of you have hit the same wall. we do infotainment and HMI testing on a HIL bench. the test is half software half physical, you drive the unit over ADB, and around it you've got relay cards, audio, CAN signals standing in for the rest of the car. somewhere in there you have to check the actual screen is doing the right thing. The screen check is the annoying bit. comparing pixels against internal state is brittle and it breaks constantly. the obvious thing now is to point a vision model at the screenshot and let it read the HMI for you. problem for us is we're under TISAX, customer data and screenshots can't leave our network, so anything that ships frames off to a vendor cloud is a no from compliance. full stop.

So the requirement ends up a bit awkward. drive the HMI on the real or simulated hardware, talk to the bench, check the screen, and keep the model and the data fully inside our own infra, ideally our own Bedrock or an on-prem box. plenty of tools do one or two of those bits. finding one that does the lot without the data leaving is the hard part. For what it's worth we're looking at a few right now, some homegrown opencv plus scripting, Squish for the Qt side, and a couple of the agent/vision ones like Askui and the open-source computer-use stuff, mostly judged on whether we can run the model self-hosted. not settled on anything, we're optimizing for robustness over cost at this stage.

Main thing i'm after, how are you doing the on-screen HMI check specifically, and is anyone running the ai-vision part fully self-hosted, or did compliance kill that for you too?

We had a block of RTL that was mostly AI-assisted. described the behavior, it generated something clean, and it simulated perfectly. Verilator was green, then QuestaSim was green on the fuller testbench too. synthesis came back fine, timing closed, no warnings worth caring about. The FPGA sits inside an actual product, it drives part of the device's real-world behavior. once the bitstream was on the board, the device did something the sim never showed. not a timing violation we could point at. the device-level behavior was just wrong under real conditions the testbench didn't model. you know the feeling. sim-correct and silicon-correct have never been the same thing.

But what's different now is volume. when a human wrote every line, verification roughly kept pace because writing was the slow part. AI removed the slow part. we generate more RTL in a week than we used to in a month, and the testbench is still the testbench. so the gap between what got written and what actually got checked on real hardware is wider than it's ever been, and a green sim says almost nothing about that gap.
The part that bugs me is the sim didn't lie exactly, it answered the question it was asked and we just kept mistaking that answer for proof the device works.

So what i need to know is how are you closing the loop at the device level now, where the RTL meets the rest of the real system? is your hardware-level check keeping up with how fast the generated code lands, or is sim still doing more trust-work than it should??