Turning everyone into critical AI thinkers & builders.
Testing before tweeting
Building with, not for
Build with AI. Build critical AI literacy. Use AI to strengthen the branch you’re sitting on, not cut it off.
Subscribe
By the numbers
Each bar is a real milestone. Substack Bestseller at month 6. No ads, no hacks. Just consistent publishing, deep quality research, and a community I actively listen to, build with, and write alongside every step of the way.
Catch us over in the community
Hover, chase, click. Whichever order works.
Hint: it gets tired after a few dodges.
Frameworks I've built through my work with AI, and where each one lives.
A posture for practitioners and builders that moves you from plain AI literacy to critical AI literacy. Plain literacy teaches you to operate the tool. Attitude teaches you to notice what the tool is doing to you while you do it.
Read the origin post →The tension of helping build AI systems while raising children who will inherit their consequences. The core claim is that inside access creates responsibility, not certainty.
Read the origin post →A four-layer framework for AI agent context. The layers are Identity, Knowledge, State, and Task. It stops prompts from collapsing under their own weight when you scale from single tasks to full agentic workflows.
Explore the framework →Quick answers to what readers ask most.
A Substack Bestseller newsletter and builder community I founded to teach critical AI literacy through practice. Guides, decision frameworks, tool reviews, and builder stories for AI product managers, vibe coders, and anyone building with AI deliberately.
I do. I'm Karo Zieminski, a Senior AI Product Manager at Milestone Systems, an AI builder, and the founder of Product with Attitude. My work sits at the intersection of product strategy, design, and development.
AI product management, vibe coding, spec-driven development, context engineering, Claude, Perplexity, agentic AI, critical AI literacy, and Substack growth for creators. Every article is built on real testing, not repackaged press releases.
Both free and paid subscriptions live on Substack. Free subscribers get regular articles. Paid subscribers get exclusive workflows, advanced guides, AI tool discounts, and access to the builder community.
Three so far: AI with Attitude (a posture for critical AI literacy), the Builder-Parent Paradox (the tension of building AI while raising children who will inherit the consequences), and the Context Pyramid (a four-layer framework for AI agent context covering Identity, Knowledge, State, and Task).
Use, understand, evaluate, and challenge AI systems with informed judgment.
Prompts, workflows, and guides for getting the most out of Anthropic's Claude.
Deep dives into Perplexity features, research workflows, and enterprise use cases.
From first prompt to shipped product. Guides, tools, and real build stories for vibe coders.
Exclusive discounts on AI tools and products, updated quarterly for Premium members.
See why brands choose PwA
12 tasks mapped to Chat, Cowork, Code, or Design. The fastest way to pick the right Claude surface.
6 scenarios mapped to the right Opus 4.8 setting. When to raise effort, when to use Fast mode, and when Dynamic Workflows pay off. Tested May 2026.
7 Figma MCP tools mapped to the right call order in Claude Code. When to call each, what it returns, and the failure mode. Tested May 2026.
Three orchestrator models in 68 days. Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7, then GPT 5.5 as default for Pro and Max. The canonical timeline. Tested May 2026.
Six tiers compared. Free, Pro, Max, Education Pro, Enterprise Pro, Enterprise Max. From $0 to $271 per seat per month. Tested May 2026.
Four layers every AI agent needs. Identity, Knowledge, State, Task. The mental model that stops your prompts from collapsing under their own weight.
9-tool matrix. Skills, Prompts, MCP, Projects, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Cursor Rules, Custom GPTs, AgentKit. Where each lives, when it loads, when to use it.
Plain-English glossary for AI builders. Five isolation terms explained with one house-and-workshop analogy. Stop fumbling sandbox, VM, container, MicroVM, and sandboxed VM.
Adult brainstorming prompt vs Preschool Brain Prompt. 12 dimensions side by side. The first sounds smart in a deck. The second sounds memorable in a Note.
A term coined by Karo Zieminski in June 2026. What happens when AI builders parent two systems at once. Five conflicts mapped, plus an FAQ.
The best AI & Product content on Substack!
I made my first dollar with the help of Karo.
It was her shoutout, through which I found initial testers of my product. It was her post through which I gained my first customer.
Highly recommend her community!
Such great writing and product sense from Karo.
I pay $200/month for Claude, and $20 for ChatGPT. PwA costs less than any of those and is the reason the other two are worth the money. The prompts, workflows and the logic behind them saved me more credits than a month of experimenting on my own.
Joining PwA didn't just give me a community, it gave me traction. Karo has a rare ability to connect the right people at the right moment. Since joining, she's introduced me to an SEO specialist who validated my entire product homepage, and a visual branding expert who helped me build a consistent AI-generated avatar for my personal brand. That kind of curated network is hard to find. PwA accelerated things I would have figured out alone, eventually.
Joining Product with Attitude was the moment I stopped just critiquing AI and started building with it. Karo's real gift is making the leap from critique to construction feel obvious rather than intimidating. She is a rare kind of community leader: a champion of voices that don't usually get the mic, and an educator who teaches by gathering people instead of performing at them. Slow AI is sharper for it.
Karo has a unique approach to product creation, one that's very rare to find, and I've searched a lot! Must join if you're into product design!
Joining PwA turned building from a solo hobby into a high stakes sport. Through this community, I found the visibility to launch DraftKit and stopped wasting time on the performance of product management. It is more than just networking. We are unifying our voices. Exchanging ideas with you and other builders, especially during the AI Advent Challenge, has been a massive force multiplier. We feed and grow each other's minds and builds in a way that just does not happen in corporate silos. If you want to find the people who actually understand the why behind the system and move at the speed of the frontier, this is the room.
Karo welcomed me when I was fairly new to Substack and had no credibility on the platform. She builds her community truly with passion, made time to offer opportunities to connect with builders, highlighted me in her different series that helped me with visibility and exposure.
What surprised me more was the mentorship. She would reply to my DMs and open to discuss things I was missing. She pointed me in a better direction. The difference in how I think about my own publications is already showing with that direction.
Product with Attitude isn't just a newsletter. It's a community Karo actively builds, and I'm lucky to be in it.
Karo is an exceptional writer and an engager par excellence.
I found your work to be the most interesting on Substack because you actually build and showcase. Would be rad to get the chance to share notes one day. Appreciate what you're building here.
Karo writes about AI product in a way that's rare: she doesn't just explain tools, she builds critical thinking around them. Her framework for AI literacy is a must-read.
One of the most genuine, insightful voices in the AI product space. Karo's perspective cuts through the noise. Her newsletter is one of the few I actually look forward to reading.
Karo writes like a builder who actually ships. No fluff, no filler. Just real insights from someone deep in the trenches of AI product work. Rare find on Substack.
I read a lot of AI newsletters. Most repeat the same takes. Karo is the reason I got here. Her heart is as strong as her builder attitude. She's the perfect person to learn all the tricks of building products with AI from.
I honestly love the breakdowns, the cross-collab posts, and the community and conversations. The content is top notch, the attitude exactly what I think we need to see more of in 2026, and the author's just an awesome person and passionate about AI.
I was bookmarking AI articles I never read and feeling more behind every week. Two months in, I was the person our team came to with AI questions.
I was “using AI” for eight months and shipped nothing. Three weeks in, I had my first working agent running on my own data.
Other AI spaces are either intimidatingly technical or surface-level cheerleading. PwA's comments section is full of people who are building real things, sharing what broke, and helping each other fix it. I've gotten more useful feedback on my landing page from PwA members than from three months of posting in build-in-public communities.
I build in private because I'm an introvert. PwA feels like it was written for people like me. I've been a paid subscriber for 8 mo and I've never commented. But I've used something from every single issue.
Been reading Karo's articles for a few months now, she really offers a highly practical, no-fluff perspective on context engineering and building with AI agents that helps transition from just using tools to designing advanced, native workflows.
Karo helped me understand that critical AI literacy is not about being anti-AI. It’s about staying responsible while using it. I recommend everyone read her Builder-Parent Paradox essay.
PwA is the only newsletter I read the same day it lands.
Tris Hussey invited me here. First week in, I got to watch builders in their natural habitat. Karo's community gives back.
The chat is alive. People are actually shipping things and talking about the real stuff underneath the polished version. Karo had built something I hadn't seen in a long time: a room where the welcome is genuine and the help is faster than you expect.
I found my voice again in here. Found my purpose. Found ECHO.
If you're building something and you're not in this community, you're missing the part that makes building not feel lonely.
