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SEO for AI, spec-driven development, and cold email platforms
Nov, 2025
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👋 This is The Pipette – a monthly newsletter for product builders with links so good their ideas warrant a reply, a forward, or even a discussion in real life.
- Psychology – In a recent study, researchers found that brain similarity is an indicator of how likely two people are to become friends. They measured how participants reacted to videos, then tracked their social networks over time. The results imply that how we see and interpret the world around us influences who we’re likely to form connections with over time. The researchers are also examining how our existing friendships may affect brain activity over time. The saying “you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with” feels relevant.
- Software Engineering – GenAI and agents are making it easier than ever to produce code at scale, creating a new paradigm in the process – spec-driven development. The success of the generated code is dependent on the quality of the context provided. This is especially true for brownfield engineering projects, where LLMs need to be fed deep institutional knowledge. Specification-driven development focuses on producing AI-ready docs with data types, product requirements, business logic, error handling, and security constraints defined upfront. This shifts the process upstream, avoiding the need to adjust prompts on the fly.
- Compliance – Transcend is a data privacy solution that focuses on the entire lifecycle of customer data. While we’ve all seen the cookie banners (some of us have even implemented them on sites), they tend to focus solely on first-party cookies and analytics data, which can be insufficient for auditing purposes. Transcend also automates compliance for processes like CPRA Do Not Sell/Share requests, which can be cumbersome to manage manually.
- Marketing – Managing email delivery rates while running a cold outreach campaign can be daunting at best. Instantly.ai is an email platform designed explicitly for sending cold emails. It utilizes a deliverability network and warm-up tactics to enhance sending reputation and increase open/click rates. We’ve personally seen open rates jump from 18% to 52% when switching from a standard email platform.
- Artificial Intelligence – One of Google’s top AI scientists thinks that with AI’s rapid advancements and AGI on the horizon, learning how to learn will become a critical skill to develop. He classifies the other “meta-skills,” such as optimizing your learning approach on a per-subject basis, as skills that should be taught alongside math, science, etc. Reflecting on this, most of our learning occurs in structured environments, such as school or specialized programs, so we must craft our own in a corporate or personal learning context.
- Artificial Intelligence – OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, a browser that tightly integrates ChatGPT. It includes a prominent chat sidebar to ask questions about any current open tab(s). However, the core feature is an agent mode, where ChatGPT can control the browser to execute tasks for you — for example, searching Instacart for a shopping list based on a prompt. Outside of the current chat, you can also choose to let the browser accumulate “memories” through browsing & chat history. Handy? Scary? Yes. 🎨 P.S. Design peeps, let us know your take on the glass/scrolling background effect on the site.
- Marketing (SEO) – With Google’s AI overviews in place, and more and more people using ChatGPT to search for answers, the SEO community is discussing whether to optimize for AEO/GEO (here’s an explainer for those acronyms, btw). The general guidance is not to create content just for SEO, and definitely not for LLMs. Put your users first and you’ll be rewarded.