let users bring their own AI

We've all closed the tab.

A twelve-step intake form. "Step 2 of 9." Gone.

I hit this wall building SignalDeck, my pitch deck builder. To produce a strong deck I needed the story, the audience, the brand, the traction, the tone. A hundred questions, easy.

Then I noticed something. Almost every user was going to draft their answers in Claude or ChatGPT first, then paste them into my form.

So we were both paying for the same conversation. The user paid Claude to interview them. I was about to build an interview UI on top of that. Twice the tokens, twice the friction, half the patience.

The fix was embarrassingly simple. Skip the form. Hand the user one prompt. Let their AI do the interview. Get the JSON back.

One shot. One copy. One paste.

Because honestly, who knows your project better than your AI right now? Your chat history is months of context. The bits you've half written. The version you almost shipped. You can trust it to interview you well, and skip a hundred questions you've already answered somewhere else.

the move

1. Product hands you a prompt.
2. You paste it into your AI.
3. Your AI interviews you in your own context.
4. It spits out structured JSON.
5. You paste it back. The form fills itself in.

why this wins

Users already have an LLM open. The form is competing with a tool they're more loyal to. Use it.

AIs are better interviewers. One question at a time. Follow-ups on weird answers. No rigid validation that makes you feel like a robot.

You can ask more. A 30-field form scares people off. A 30-question conversation doesn't. You learn the user properly, then use what you learned to guide the rest of the product. Richer data, no burnt patience.

Collection decouples from rendering. The product becomes a JSON receiver. Any AI works. Any prompt works. It's portable.

Users stay in control. They see the JSON before pasting. They can edit it. They trust the output because they ran it.

Zero AI bill for you. No LLM integration, no retrieval, no rate limits, no eval drift. The user's AI does all the work.

what to build

Long intake form? Onboarding, KYB, application, brief, design questionnaire, pitch deck. Add the paste path. Don't replace the guided path. Give people both.

The prompt is your new product surface. Write it like an API contract: what fields, what shape, what validation. Version it. Add a "copy" button. Accept the JSON back. Validate. Render.

the bigger shift

Users now bring their AI everywhere, like a personal assistant. The products that survive are the ones that hand off cleanly to whichever AI the user has chosen. Not the ones building a worse chatbot inside their own walls.

agents are users too

Long forms don't just bore humans. They slow down the AI agents now trying to use your page on someone's behalf.

Operator. computer-use. The Claude tab someone left running with a task. Every wizard step is a DOM read, a click, a retry, more context burned. A 30-step flow eats an agent's budget the same way a 30-field form scares off a person.

The paste path serves both. One read. One write. Done.

Most intake forms should just be prompts.