The Grief and the Third Path
The craft you're mourning might not be the craft you're losing.
Developers and designers are independently grieving the same thing right now, and it took me a while to realize they’re not mourning the skill. They’re mourning the tribe. Dave Gauer wrote about losing his social identity as a programmer—still writing code, still loving it, but unable to recognize the culture around it. The community that used to care about the craft now feels like it’s about speed, or pulling a slot machine lever on prompts. Swap “programming” for “design” and you have the conversation I’ve been observing and living all year.
Nolan Lawson made the uncomfortable part explicit: the tools work. They write code better than most of developers and certainly most designers. And the economic gravity is real—I’ve watched it with every industry shift I’ve lived through. Desktop publishing, print to web, mobile apps. Each time, the people with mortgages and families learned the new tools first because they couldn’t afford not to. You don’t get to sit out a paradigm shift when your family depends on your paycheck. You adapt on company time and mourn the old craft on your own. The idealism erodes fast when the market has already moved. Geoffrey Huntley calculated that AI-powered software development now costs $10.42 an hour—less than minimum wage. Swap “software developer” for “designer” and the timeline gets uncomfortable. Lawson frames what’s left as two options: abstain on principle or capitulate for the paycheck.
I don’t buy the binary. There’s a third path—use the tools to expand what your craft can produce—and I keep running into people who are already walking it.
Anton Sten, a designer, built his own invoicing tool in two days with Claude and Cursor. Not by following SaaS patterns—by throwing them out. The tool serves one user. It parses his contracts, drafts his invoices, answers questions about his billing history. He stopped squeezing his workflow into someone else’s product and started making exactly what he needed. And like me, he used those same tools to rebuild his website.
The same expansion is reshaping how design work gets done. Édouard Wautier’s team at Dust prototypes directly in code, skipping Figma after the initial sketch. His description—more like clay than drafting—captures something the grief narrative misses: working in code with AI agents can be more tactile, not less. You shape, test, feel, adjust. The artifact becomes the thing, not a picture of the thing. Jonny Burch argues this is where the whole field is heading—a future after Figma where the source of truth lives in code. I’m seeing it on my own team: engineers ship working features in days, and the design phase is now the slowest part of the cycle. I don’t think most design teams have reckoned with what that means yet.
Kieran Klaassen might be the furthest down this road. His compound engineering system treats every AI session as a teaching opportunity: plan, build, review, codify. Each fix gets captured so the AI doesn’t repeat the same mistake. He hasn’t opened a code editor in three months—not because he’s careless, but because he built trust through iteration. That’s what the third path looks like when you fully commit. You’re not reviewing every line. You’re building a relationship with the tool, and the tool gets better.
I highlighted stories from developers more than usual this week because what’s happened in engineering is predictive of what is beginning to happen in product design.
There is real grief. We’re all feeling it. The discipline is fracturing. But I think the people mourning are mourning a specific version of the craft—the one defined by the tools and rituals of the last decade. The craft itself is still here. It’s just a different shape now.
What I’m Consuming
How to shoot a screen using a board of keys. I grew up with a Mac 512K and still remember ⌘⇧1 to eject the floppy disk—so learning that’s why the screenshot shortcuts start at 3 was a revelation. Marcin Wichary traces the whole lineage, from the 1986 floppy eject commands through 2018’s Screenshot app. The real gem is Acorn 8’s ⌘⇧7, which captures each window as a separate layer you can recompose afterward. That’s software craft. (Marcin Wichary / Unsung)
About Letters to a Young Creator. The Steve Jobs Archive collected candid letters from over 30 creative figures—Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Ed Catmull, Dieter Rams, Es Devlin, and others—answering questions from SJA Fellows about what it takes to make something great. The title nods to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, one of Steve’s favorites. Originally released as small-press editions, the full collection is now available online. (Steve Jobs Archive)
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War. Anthropic drew two lines it won’t cross: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Under threat from the DoD, Anthropic refused. Anti-mass surveillance and anti-autonomous murderbots are moral red lines to have, and I’m glad they didn’t cave. On Friday, the administration indeed canceled the contract and labeled Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk to national security,” a designation reserved for adversarial foreign companies. (Dario Amodei / Anthropic)
SaaS Isn’t Dead. But the Way You Used to Win in B2B? That’s Gone. The old SaaS playbook—lock up a category early, grind to $100M ARR over five years, coast on inertia—is done. AI-native startups are reaching $100M in twelve months with 50-person teams, shipping weekly, and winning on ROI instead of switching costs. Incumbents who haven’t shipped meaningful improvements in two years are watching customers finally find a reason and a path to leave. (Jason Lemkin / SaaStr)