“Let me share my screen”

You can get my attention on a group Zoom call with that phrase. Something is about to happen.

When conferences went online a few years back, I used to toss little bits like this into presentations to reengage an audience that probably had 100 other tabs open.

“You’ll want to close your email and check out this next slide,” I might say. I was recently reminded of that time when someone started screen sharing during a call with one of my communities.

A few members discussed whether certain features were part of a new AI tool. An easy solution was for one to share screen, which looked something like this:

Knowing a developer was on the other side of that screen share made me pay extra attention.

Any time you can get a chance to watch even one developer, you’ll learn something. They don’t even have to be using your product!

This dev typed out a long prompt into the tool about the app they wanted to build. Then they hit ENTER…

And this modal popped up instantly:

What a bummer.

I could hear their disappointment. Actually, it was more than disappointment; it was disgust.

The app lost some trust with that move. I watched as the dev clicked Sign Up, then hovered over the GitHub option. But they chose email instead because that wouldn’t risk access to their code repos.

As you might expect, the email address was a burner GMail account. A few clicks later, they were in and could see the results of the prompt. But the excitement had waned, and they were more skeptical.

That’s how quickly you can lose a dev’s trust. And I saw it happen by watching one developer for just a few minutes.

And YES, there are technical and business reasons why this devtool likely chose this signup flow.

Consider this a reminder that those decisions have trade-offs.

You can learn about them by watching even one developer. Or when you ​work with a team​ who have watched thousands.