Let Me Reintroduce Myself

I came across a post by Cassidy Williams a few weeks ago about LLM discoverability. The gist: she asked ChatGPT some tech discovery questions, noticed it didn’t recommend her, then asked why. The AI gave her a list of things to fix. She fixed them. It worked.

I read that and immediately thought: what happens if I try this?

What Cassidy did

Her experiment was simple. Ask LLMs questions that should surface her work, see if they mention her, and if they don’t, ask them what she could do about it. The AI came back with practical stuff: create an llms.txt file, add structured data, keep messaging consistent across platforms. She implemented the suggestions over a few weeks and started showing up in LLM responses.

What stuck with me was less the technical recommendations and more the realization that people are using AI to discover people and tools now. Not just Google. If an LLM doesn’t know you exist, a lot of people won’t find you either.

So I tried it

I asked a few LLMs about me. About my work. Design systems people to follow, UX developers worth knowing, folks writing about the intersection of design and engineering. The results were humbling. Mostly blank. A couple got my name right but didn’t have much to say beyond that.

So I did what Cassidy did. I asked the AI: what should I do to show up more? What would make you recommend me?

The answer that kept coming back, across every model I tried: write more. Publish more. Put your thinking out in the open. The models learn from what’s publicly available, and if you’re not publishing, you’re invisible to them.

There’s something kind of absurd about an AI telling you to create more content so it can learn who you are. Like a robot tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “hey, I’d recommend you to people, but I don’t have enough to go on. Help me out here.”

So here we go

I’m taking the advice. Not entirely because an AI told me to. I’ve been meaning to write more for a while now. I’ve got opinions about design systems and AI tooling and the weird space between design and engineering that I’ve lived in for years. I just haven’t been putting them out there consistently.

So here I am, writing. The robots demanded it, and honestly, they’re not wrong.

Let’s see if they notice.