Moving goal posts
Hey—it’s Matt.
Things are moving fast. This week alone felt like a dozen mind-shattering announcements in tech and AI—each one demanding my attention, analysis, action (or reaction).
With every new “thing” announced, I found myself landing in this uncomfortable middle ground. Aware that everything is changing, yet too overwhelmed to meaningfully act on any of it.
Nowhere is this more true for me than with SEO and AI—especially as I’m preparing to launch Jasin and thinking deeply about organic reach and marketing in the new world of search.
We’re not preparing for what’s coming. We’re just patching what’s breaking. And patching doesn’t scale. The question isn’t whether AI will transform search (it certainly will)—it’s whether we’ll be ready for what that means when it does.
Well, on that happy note (kidding… sort of…)—let’s get into it.
Most Interesting
AI Is Outpacing SEO—and Most People Are Still Writing for 2019
This LinkedIn post hit harder than I expected.
The author lays out a simple but brutal point: SEO as we knew it is getting replaced by AI that summarizes, rewrites, and re-routes attention—before a human ever lands on your content.
The really concerning part is that I realized how many of my assumptions still come from the old model:
- Write → rank → convert
- Keywords → content → traffic
But if AI is the first reader of your content… you’re not writing for people anymore—you’re writing through a filter that thinks faster and more broadly than you. That’s what we’re dealing with now, and it changes everything about discoverability on the web.
Weekly Build
Quiet Infrastructure + Big Payoff
This wasn’t a flashy week for Jasin, but it was productive in all the right ways. I’m getting close to wrapping up work on the app itself, and I should be moving to marketing and a new landing page next week. But this week:
Analytics got a full rebuild:
- Now you can reliably track views + clicks on each product card embed
- I setup a new admin debug page for testing and verifying clicks
- Better caching + error handling for users
The frontend also got cleaner and smoother, with better loading UI/UX, refined product card styles, and a lot more polish to make everything feel more cohesive.
If you’re interested in playing around with it when I launch the beta, I’d love to have you sign up!
Tools & Finds
Delphi → delphi.aiI’m feeding Delphi my “brain”—all the links, notes, content I create online. Too early to judge usefulness, but if it delivers on its pitch (a single searchable interface for everything I write and read), you’ll be able to chat with me about anything whenever you want. I’ll keep you posted.
Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus → anthropic.com/news/claude-4I’ve only used it for one day, but I’m legit impressed. The jump from 3.7 is real. It feels faster, better at context, way more of a co-thinker than a co-coder. Anthropic’s getting serious. Give it a try if you haven’t—you’ll be impressed.
Three fonts that sparked my interest this week:
- Utility Sans: Semi-monospaced, razor clean. Feels techy without being sterile.
- Fixel: Wild range of weights and styles. Versatile for modern branding.
- GT Standard: Balanced and beautiful. A variable font that can go serious or playful without losing it’s look.
Building my childhood dream PC → fabiensanglard.net/2168/A nostalgic deep-dive into retro tech, which always holds a special place in my heart. This is a love letter to old machines—the ones we learned on and grew up with.
How to build an AI-powered product in a weekend → mattdowney.com/blogs/posts/ai-product-development-weekend-buildThis is the process I use to go from “half-idea” to “shipped MVP” in under 48 hours—an approach rooted in modern AI product development tools, but grounded in old-school creative process.
Closing Thought
Trying to ship while the goal posts continue to move is humbling.
Clarity doesn’t come from pausing or stopping because the outcome is uncertain. It comes from moving through the noise—one system, one decision, one new “thing” at a time.
All the best,
Matt Downey
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My Stack
These are the tools that help me run my business every day. I happily pay for each of them—they’re worth every penny. I hope you find them useful, too.
- Beehiiv → How I send this newsletter every week. 10/10 would recommend.
- Brain.fm → How I kickstart my productivity and find flow-state.
- Figma → How I quickly go from idea to design to product.
- Mercury → The best business banking I’ve ever used.
- Screen Studio → How I record engaging videos.
- Typefully → How I post content to my socials.
- Kick → My bookkeeping on auto-pilot.