Field notes from building Carom
An ongoing log of the design and engineering decisions behind Carom.
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How we built the Carom demo
A few weeks ago we argued that there are only bad reasons not to have a good demo, so it’s only right that we introduce ours and describe how we built it. The short version: we leaned heavily on LLMs to create a substantial amount of realistic data. But to do that, we needed to first invent a company, called Bankshot: five employees, a cast of customers and investors and job candidates, with twenty-two detailed storylines that paint a realistic portrait of how teams collaborate. Only then did we create a single email, file, or task.
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Balancing private contacts and transparency
Privacy and collaboration are inherently opposed. The only way to be sure nothing privileged or personal is shared inappropriately is to have no sharing at all, and the only way to be sure every conversation is available to anyone who may need it is to share everything.
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There are only bad reasons not to have a good demo
Enterprise software has a credibility problem. It’s a pain to buy—or even to figure out a price—and relies too often on slick salespeople selling to buyers who aren’t users. With a few notable exceptions, the “try a demo” link on a B2B site lands you on a salesperson’s call list, not in a working version of the software you want to buy. For companies selling to small and medium-sized businesses, there are fewer and fewer excuses for hiding their products from prospects—and it’s no longer fair to blame the difficulty of creating a good demo for the lack of one.
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Using LLMs to combat UI drift
Software has a natural tendency to drift and sprawl, starting with a pristine design but ending up with a hodgepodge of similar but distinct ways of displaying data or accomplishing tasks. Avoiding that drift requires deliberate effort, and fixing it after the fact is hard. Fortunately, an LLM used right is a great tool to reduce drift.
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Just vibecode it
Like anyone in the software world—hell, the world—we’re big fans of coding with large language models. It’s amazing! Give Claude Code a few sentences and plenty of tokens, keep your laptop open, take a walk, and come back to a production-ready application made bespoke for you.
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Designing a closer look at your day
We like to sweat the details of every screen in Carom, especially the ones that communicate the most critical information. That means we ask a lot of questions, reject a lot of ideas, and refine a lot of concepts. Here are some of the decisions that led to the feature you'll see in Carom today.