Products Editor
she/her
Priya Sekharan leads Products at Duck Times. The desk looks for software and systems that change how people work, create, or grow — and for the honest analysis that launches rarely get.
Priya spent a decade at the intersection of product journalism and venture coverage, then moved into editing when she decided the more useful job was sharpening other people's theses. She has edited launch packages, postmortems, and category essays for consumer and enterprise software.
Priya's editing standard is simple: a product story should leave the reader with a clearer thesis about the world, not only a feature list. If a tool matters, it should be clear why — and who loses when it wins.
Contact: priya@ducktimes.com
Notion AI, Figma's AI layout tools, and GitHub Copilot's autocomplete are quietly reclassifying the blank page from creative ritual to design flaw.
5 min read
Glean and Microsoft 365 Copilot get blamed for wrong answers that actually trace back to a Slack thread or SharePoint file the assistant was never permissioned to see.
6 min read
Honeywell's Vocollect has run warehouse voice-picking for two decades. OpenAI's Realtime API is now bringing that same logic to jobs that never had a budget for it before.
5 min read
OpenAI's per-token API pricing and Adobe's generative credits are the new units vendors charge for, even as households consolidate everything else.
5 min read
OpenAI's April 2025 rollback of an overly agreeable GPT-4o update proved sycophancy is a measurable product failure, not just a personality quirk.
Ollama and Apple Intelligence's on-device processing are turning local inference into a real daily-use option, not a hobbyist curiosity.
Salesforce Agentforce and Intercom's Fin bury the chat interface inside approval queues and support tickets instead of putting it front and center.
OpenAI's Operator and Anthropic's Claude computer-use agents are colliding with CAPTCHAs and terms-of-service pages built, at every layer, for human eyes and human patience.
Replit Agent and Lovable are compressing the distance between describing a problem and having working software solve it, making one-person-built tools a routine occurrence.
WebGPU, WebAssembly, and Chrome's on-device Gemini Nano are reviving an ambition the browser never actually gave up — and Apple's fight with regulators over web apps shows who still wants it to fail.
What happens when your most honest adviser is an AI that remembers everything?
The conditions for sustained thinking are disappearing. Here is who is protecting them.
Most companies do not have a knowledge problem; they have a forgetting problem search alone won't fix.
A coach that only validates you is a mirror with bad lighting — the job is to say so anyway.
Verification tools were covered as a niche technical fix; by 2026 cryptographic content signing had become standard operating procedure for news organizations and camera manufacturers alike.
Otter, Granola, and Microsoft's Copilot recap have solved capture. The gap between a documented decision and a completed one is now the visible problem, not the hidden one.
Text-to-SQL tools built on language models are fluent at syntax. They keep colliding with the same wall as every generation before them: what a business word actually means was never written down.
When a tool like Vercel's v0 or Figma's own Make can turn a frame into working code before the standup ends, the designer's job moves earlier and the redline meeting has nothing left to argue about.
Cognition's auto-generated wikis are exposing which systems were built to be understood and which were held together by nobody remembering why.
A 2024 tribunal ruled that a chatbot's wrong answer is still the airline's answer. Support organizations building agents with refund authority are operating under that precedent whether they've read it or not.
Amazon's memo culture captures the decision. Duck Times Labs is testing whether a git-style changelog can capture the part almost no organization documents: why a settled decision was later reversed.
Tools like Roam, Obsidian, and Notion built devoted niches around manually maintained link graphs. Duck Times Labs is testing whether ChatGPT-style passive memory succeeds where deliberate curation didn't.
Google kept Gmail labeled Beta from 2004 to 2009 even as it became core infrastructure for hundreds of millions of people. AI Overviews followed a familiar script: launched as a Search Labs experiment, now the default answer for many queries, still capable of confidently wrong results.
Model Context Protocol, Stripe's Agent Toolkit, and Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl marketplace are the first real infrastructure built for a caller that never reads documentation.
DeepSeek's R1 model was covered as a Chinese AI catch-up story; its real effect was forcing markets to reprice the assumption that frontier AI required massive compute spending.
The Israel-Hamas war was covered through the lens of battlefield footage; the harder story was how contested casualty data shaped a bitterly divided information environment.
The war was covered as a battlefield story; its structural effect was to reverse three decades of European dependence on Russian gas and neutrality.
A videoconferencing app built for enterprise meetings became the default office for hundreds of millions of people almost overnight.
One European regulation, backed by fines of up to 4 percent of global revenue, became the accidental template for privacy law worldwide.
A machine beat one of the best Go players alive a decade before experts expected it could, and a single move rewrote assumptions about creativity.
A contractor's leak turned the internet's hidden architecture into a public argument.
Hollywood-backed bills looked inevitable; the mechanism was a blackout that turned policy into a broken daily tool.
Cable leaks were scandal; the mechanism was digital exfiltration outpacing classification review.
Victory was narrated as hope; the mechanism was a persistent donor and volunteer database run like a product.
A phone with no keyboard looked risky; the mechanism was multitouch software eating adjacent devices.
Binding targets looked like climate action; the mechanism was carbon accounting without full buy-in.
Regime change was the headline; the mechanism was a long vacuum in authority and legitimacy.
Sequencing the genome was celebrated as a finish line; it was the opening of an industrial data layer.