u/getSchmade

What it is: you describe what you want like you'd explain it to a coworker. Meerkat puts that brief in front of GPT, Claude, and Gemini — they each write the prompt their own way, it merges the strongest parts of each into one, then runs the result on a real example so you see proof, not a score. Built for people who use AI daily but don't want to learn prompt engineering.

Test it at getmeerkat.dev/try — no signup, takes about two minutes with a real task.

What I'm trying to find out:

1. The big one: is the prompt it builds actually better than what you'd get just asking ChatGPT to write it? That's the whole bet — if you run both and mine loses, I genuinely need to know.
2. Did the two-minute chat feel like it was asking the right questions, or did it miss what mattered about your task?
3. Was the final prompt something you'd actually use, or did you want to edit it first?

There's also a free roast tool at getmeerkat.dev/roast if you'd rather feed it an existing prompt and see what it says — but the builder is the thing I most need stress-tested.

Honest feedback welcome — it dishes out roasts, so it can take one.

Hey everyone!

I built a tool that improves your AI prompts and proves the improvement by actually running them - not just scoring them on paper. Naturally I posted it where the prompt experts hang out. Mostly crickets, plus one comment that rewired my brain: "Have you defined who your ideal user is? It seems like those in this forum are not it."

They were right, and it wasn't the sub's fault — they were a great crowd giving honest answers. The mismatch was mine: my product isn't for people who are deep in the craft. It's for the founder, the marketer, and the ops person who doesn't want to learn prompt engineering - they just want the prompt to work. I was pitching a "skip learning this" tool to the exact people who enjoy learning it.

So I'm doing two things:

1. Repositioning everything around "you don't need to be a prompt person."
   1. I went through the whole UI and ripped out the jargon — one card literally said "added a data fence for the JSON blob," which means nothing to a normal human. Now it says what actually happened in plain words.
2. Moving where I talk about it to where my real users actually hang out, which it turns out is not AI communities at all.

It's called Meerkat: you describe what you want in plain English, three different AI models each write the prompt from their own angle, it merges the best of each, then runs the result on a real example so you see proof instead of a score.

Curious if others here have had the "great product, wrong audience" moment? How did you figure out where your people actually were?
^^ That's the part I'm still working out.

Meerkat has a free tier. Would love some feedback!

I've been poking around Reddit the past few days, and in subs like this one there are people left and right asking someone to validate their idea, look at their site, try their product. And I get it — you turn to the community that's supposed to get it, hoping for honest feedback, no paywall.

But a lot of those posts get scrolled past. Not all, but a lot. And seeing the low upvotes and no replies has to make the person feel like they're talking to a wall. That's the part that gets me. You shouted as loud as you could to your own tribe, and it came back as nothing. It makes you wonder if the thing's even worth feedback. Usually it is — people are just busy and the feed's a firehose.

So here's where I'm coming from, fully honest.

I built a tool called Sensei. Any time I spin up a new project and want to validate the idea or find my own blind spots, I go straight to it — because I'm the reason it exists in the first place. It gives you a strategic read on a product or idea: whether it's worth your time, where you actually win, how you're being seen, who eats your lunch if you don't move.

Yeah, it's an AI tool, and I catch flak for building "another AI wrapper." Honest take: you could grind similar answers out of ChatGPT, sure. But a chat window answers the question you thought to ask — it doesn't have an opinion about what you forgot. And the stuff that kills products is exactly the stuff you didn't know to ask about. That's the whole point of Sensei. It comes at your idea from the angles you wouldn't think to prompt, because if you'd thought of them, they wouldn't be your blind spots. That's the part I spent months on — it's layered. Someone sharper than me when I started could've built it faster, but I took my time thinking about what I'm actually blind to when it comes to products.

What I actually want isn't your money. Take a free month, no card on file, so nothing can quietly bill you on day 31. Run your idea through it and tell me where it's wrong, where it's generic, where it wasted your time. And if you keep coming back after the month's up — that tells me more than any survey could. If it turns out useful to you, I genuinely want to know what you'd realistically pay for it. That's the feedback I can't get anywhere else.

asksensei.dev/try — start with a URL or one sentence about your idea and watch it work.

And if you don't want to touch the link, drop your idea in the comments and I'll give you a real read myself.

That part's not conditional on anything.

I've coordinated crews for events for a while now and the thing that still gets me every time is the gap between the roster and reality. People sign up, the schedule looks fully staffed, and then on the day you're somehow short three people at the one station that can't be short.

Self-reported check-in never worked for me. People mark themselves present from the parking lot, or a friend checks them in, and you don't find out a spot was actually empty until something's already on fire. So I've ended up relying on team leads physically confirming their people, which works but doesn't scale past a certain size and falls apart the second a lead is busy.

I'm curious how others handle this, especially with volunteers where you can't exactly discipline a no-show. Do you overstaff on purpose and accept the waste? Keep a standby list and scramble? Some check-in system that actually holds up? Low-tech answers very welcome, I feel like I've overcomplicated this.

I've been posting here about a few of my side projects lately, so here's another one. This is the one I was most nervous to build.

It's an app that lets you track medications for a whole family in one place — parents, kids, yourself — and check for interactions between everything someone's taking, including OTC stuff and supplements. What kicked it off was how absurdly fragmented this is for anyone managing meds for an aging parent. Eight pills, three different doctors who don't talk to each other, a pillbox, a note on the fridge, and a vague memory that grapefruit matters for one of them.

The build itself was straightforward. The genuinely hard part, and the thing I'm still wrestling with, was deciding how much the product is allowed to say. Interaction data is real and you can pull it from FDA and NIH sources, but the second a consumer app starts sounding authoritative about your meds, you've got a problem. Say too little and it's useless. Say too much and you're implying a level of medical reliability you have no business implying, and you're nudging people away from the pharmacist who should actually be making the call.

Where I landed: the app organizes and surfaces, it doesn't diagnose. It flags "these two are worth asking your pharmacist about" rather than "this is safe" or "this is dangerous." Felt like the only honest place to stand, but it cost me some of the punchier marketing I wanted to use.

For anyone who's built in a space with real-world stakes — health, finance, legal — how did you draw that line? Where's the edge between useful and overpromising?

I built a strategy tool for founders. The feedback I kept hearing was some version of "why would I pay for this, I'll just ask Claude to look at my site." And it stung because for one part of what I built, they were correct. If all you want is a one-time critique of your landing page, yeah, paste the URL into any decent model and you'll get something comparable. I was never going to win that argument.

What took me a while to see is that I was arguing about the wrong thing. The value was never that my analysis is smarter than the raw model. It's that a chat window is something you have to remember to open, decide what to ask, and do consistently every week. Almost nobody does. The product isn't the intelligence, it's the part that makes it actually happen on a schedule, with your real data already connected, watching your competitors on the days you forgot to look.

Same reason Calendly exists when you could just email about times. The capability being available to you is not the same as the thing reliably getting done.

The real lesson for me was that the objection wasn't about the product at all. It was telling me my homepage was leading with the exact part anyone can DIY. I was advertising the commodity and hiding the thing that's actually hard to replicate.

Anyone else building on top of an LLM run into this? Curious how you draw the line between "feature a model already does" and "product worth paying for."

Everyone starts their prompts with "you are an expert copywriter" or "senior dev" or whatever, and it feels productive, like you've set the stage. But it doesn't actually give the model anything to work with. It just hands it a costume.

I saw one the other day that was basically "you are an expert copywriter, write a compelling cold email that converts for my SaaS." Reads like a real prompt, right? But there's nothing under it. No product, no idea who's receiving it, no definition of what "converts" even means. Reply? Demo booked? So it just produces the same beige cold email anyone would've gotten.

The part that actually matters is the boring stuff. Who's reading it, what's the one job you want done, what counts as success, what's off limits. Once you have those you can basically delete the "expert" line and it still works fine.

Curious whether people here actually find the role line useful or if it's mostly a comfort thing. Drop your worst prompt and I'll tell you what's missing.

I've been vibe coding for a while now and I have the same problem every time. I get an idea, I get excited, I build the whole thing, I ship it, and then I just... hope.

There was never a step in between. No way to find out if the idea was good before I sank weeks into it. I'd find out the hard way, after launch, when nobody showed up.

So I built the thing I wished I had. It's called Sensei. You give it your product and it reads your site, your competitors, your positioning and pricing, and tells you two things: could this idea actually work, and if it can, what do you need to fix to make sure it does. It ranks what to fix first, because a list of 20 problems isn't help, it's just anxiety.

It's free and it's pre-launch right now. I'm not trying to sell anything — honestly I'm posting here because I want to know if it's any good. If you've got a side project, run it through and tell me where the diagnosis is wrong or useless. That feedback is the whole reason I'm here.

Would love some feedback: Sensei

And separate from my tool — how do you all handle this? Do you validate ideas before building, or do you just build and find out? I genuinely think most of us are winging it and I'd like to be proven wrong.