If you've built AI into your product, check whether it's stuck at the chatbox.
The chatbox was 2023 AI design. Type a question, wait for an answer, go back to what you were doing. Google just published research on replacing it with cursor-based AI. Farza shipped a working version the same week called Clicky. Both are betting on the same thing: AI that has context of your screen, responds where you're working, and never makes you describe what you're looking at.
So how do you actually build this into your product? You score every AI feature against a three-stage rubric.
Stage 1, Destination: user leaves your product to get help. Stage 2, Embedded: AI lives inside the product but the user still manages it. Stage 3, Cursor Layer: AI sees what the user sees and responds where they are.
I ran this audit on a fictional B2B SaaS called TaskFlow. 50K users, AI sidebar that summarizes tasks and answers project questions. Looks like Stage 2. The audit said otherwise.
Their highest-frequency exit: users leaving the Gantt view to describe what they're looking at to the AI sidebar 12 times a week. The AI is 40 pixels away and users still lose context because they have to explain what they see. Stage 1 hiding inside a Stage 2 product.
Their most expensive dead question: "what's blocking this task?" Asked 6 times a day. Each time: click the task, read the thread, click linked tasks, piece it together. 3 minutes. 18 minutes per PM per day on a question the system already has the answer to.
Score each feature. Score = Frequency × Time Saved × Stage Gap ÷ Effort.
Dependency explainer fires 12 times a week. Stage 1 to Stage 3 jump. Every planning meeting picks this first. Score: 5.3. Six quarters to build.
Status update generator fires 3 times a week. Stage 1 to Stage 2. Nobody gets excited about it. Score: 24.0. One sprint.
The 1-sprint fix beats the 6-quarter rewrite.
That's the method for learning from Google and Farza. You don't copy Clicky. You don't rebuild your product around a cursor. You run the audit, find the boring feature that scores highest, and ship it in two weeks. The full audit template and scoring rubric are in the toolkit below.
Google killed ChromeOS and launched Googlebook with Gemini in the cursor. The same week a solo dev shipped the same idea for free.
The chatbox era is ending. Here's what replaces it:
🔗:
news.aakashg.com/p/cursor-la…