I’m tired of the discourse. The more I read about how AI disrupts the way we design and build software, the less I want to read and write about it. (Yes, ironically, this is about AI.)
It’s not that there aren’t interesting things happening—there are. Jev, Muse, Grok Bot, Siri AI, Dots, continuing revelations about rogue OpenAI swarms. There’s a lot.
However, I think we’ve turned the corner. AI is here to stay, regardless of whether the frontier gets paced or not, or whether data centers continue to proliferate. The models we have today have forever changed how software is made. At this point, I believe the sea changes that have been happening every two to three months have slowed. With each new model release, they might be getting faster, more intelligent, and able to perform longer-running tasks. But the major shifts have already happened. We have agents writing code, creating mockups and prototypes, doing research, and autonomously fixing bugs. Improvements will be more of the same.
For designers and product managers, it’ll be dispatching agents to take on work and then reviewing their work. I already see this on my company’s Slack using the Claude Tag. Everyone in EPD just @mentions Claude, “Fix this” and the agent dutifully does it. How fast a company can build depends on the token budget and human review bottleneck.
So the recent discourse gets more fine-grained, no longer about big shifts, but about tweaks and edges. The same topics seem to come up over and over again: design system + AI, prototyping + AI, should designers code, the bottleneck is the PR, etc. And I recently noticed that the LinkedIn posts, Medium articles, and Substacks just sound...the same.
It all has a sparkle-dusting of Opus or Sol with odd sentence constructions and overused phrasing. You recognize the phrases and words: worth, load-bearing, distinction, the X that does Y.
Mea culpa. I’m guilty too. I’ve been using AI to help me write for over a year. At first it was just a couple paragraphs here and there. But then I built a whole sophisticated writing harness to generate text that sounded like me. The flow was:
I pick the links
I add a directional note for my agent
The agent reads the article
The agent drafts the link commentary based on my direction
I tweak
The agent publishes (tags, slug, related posts, alt text)
I was fanatical about trying to catch anything that didn’t sound like me or sounded too much like AI.
What I’m Consuming
How to Get the Most Out of Jev. Jev is a new kind of AI model: it’s decisions only. Jev classifies text by answering questions with probabilities, making it fast and cheap enough to check large batches of emails or flag AI writing tells. Laura Entis explains how to turn a subjective question like “Is this email urgent?” into specific checks about the sender and the consequences of ignoring it. (Laura Entis / Every)
Why Didn’t Google Build Muse? Google has Gmail, Calendar, and an enormous head start in knowing what we need to get done. So why did Meta ship the personal assistant that got people’s attention? M.G. Siegler points to Google’s overlapping products and limited rollout, but his comparison gets especially interesting at the interface: Muse helps him discover what to do with an assistant, while Gemini Spark leaves him wondering where to begin. (M.G. Siegler / Spyglass)
Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’. A finished movie about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme nearly disappeared when Warner Bros. decided to shelve it for a tax write-off. (Just like the Batgirl movie, RIP.) Alan Siegel gathers the cast and crew’s account of making it and fighting to get it released, with some lovely production details along the way. Puppeteer Dave Barclay, who worked on Yoda and Jabba the Hutt, operated a life-sized Coyote so the actors had someone to play against. (Alan Siegel / The Ringer)
Dimensional Drawings of Apple Products. Apple publishes the technical drawings accessory designers need to build around its devices. Even if you’re not a case manufacturer, these blueprints are beautiful and fun to look at.
The Internet Is Still Fun
From time to time, I will link to cool websites or apps.
Anime User Interface. A Tumblr collection of fictional interfaces from anime, including Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell, and Evangelion. Browse animated cockpit displays and elaborate control panels alongside surprisingly ordinary keyboards. I love how much detail and personality these machines have, even when they’re only on screen for a few seconds.
Interface Cheat Sheet. Jakub Krehel’s collection of interface details pairs practical advice with interactive, side-by-side examples. Toggle the guides to see why a play icon needs optical alignment, or compare how nested corners look with different radii. A useful reference that’s also fun to poke around in.
Beautiful UI. An interactive gallery of components for AI products, including expandable activity traces and approval cards that ask before an agent acts. The examples use an imaginary ice cream business, so you can watch proposed menu changes or try a prompt bar without needing a real agent behind it. A nicely detailed collection for anyone designing beyond the chat bubble.
The Letter A-to-Z(ish) Branding Dictionary. Letter A’s illustrated glossary explains the things branding studios put in proposals, from brand descriptors to visual identity systems. Some entries explain how to use the deliverable, too. Handy for sharing with clients, with enough humour to define a deck as “A fancy word for ‘presentation document.’”
Tools of the Trade. A community-built directory of the tools that become defaults in their professions, from Mitutoyo calipers to Shure microphones. Members nominate products and vote on whether they really deserve industry-standard status. It’s fascinating to browse a trade you know nothing about and discover which objects people trust enough to keep using for decades.
Note: Summaries of links here were written by AI, then edited and approved by me.