The case for *total* Linux victory (desktop, mobile, server, iot, robots, embedded…): 1) Most agent-programmable People will want fully personalized computing experiences.
hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
if you don't actually push yourself down to sit alongside your IC engineers and your IC designers and your IC PMs, you don't actually know that stuff. So you can't make good macro decisions without the micro.
I get really nervous about having different design languages or different types of user interactions and shipping Frankensteins, basically. So, designers need to then be the people we're hiring again for design systems thinking.
you've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away.
And I like to say we we don't we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist.
So it's no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.
And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just like they're just making pull pull requests. Like they don't they don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do but like a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it and I think that's incredible for the way that companies work
when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares if most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas
as we look forward to, you know, sort of these next generation form factors, things like glasses, there's going to be a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new surface for people to build generational consumer companies.
one of the things that I noticed about computers and I think today with mobile phones, uh is that in many ways they isolate us from one another, right? They actually take us out of our social interactions.
There's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. But for a decade or so, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most. Thankfully, AI coding agents have reopened the door.
For years, it was faster to mock up software than to ship it. Designers stayed "ahead" of engineering with prototypes. Now AI coding agents make development so much faster that the loop has flipped.
every feature that we want to put out has to be queued up on mobile development bandwidth dispatch bandwidth and it become impossible to navigate tradeoff because every feature you want to do you have to go negotiate with so many team
World of Warcraft, when we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard. You don’t need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.
NotePlan is more conservative, but it’s a native Mac app, which makes it easier to use on mobile and gives you all the traditional Mac benefits like Shortcuts integration and proper window management.
But with today's AI coding agents, building software is remarkably easy. So instead of handing over static assets and static guidelines, designers can deliver custom software. Tools that let clients create their own on-brand assets whenever they need them.
The fractures fell neatly along disciplines: engineers using AI to wish away designers, designers wishing away engineers, product managers wishing away both. In this climate, AI becomes frenemy identification technology, another way to avoid working together.
I think the best, you know, designers on the product side can turn it on and off. They can go, I have my own taste. I know what I like. And then, okay, you're going for this. And that might be different than what I like, but I can match it brand as well.
PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into and it allows anyone to kind of add to that first conversation of where should we go and look further and wider and broader at the option space.
I think in this world where software can be created more easily, design matters so much and designers matter so much. I think designers are going to be the leaders of the future and I think that more designers need to speak step into that leadership role
I don't think a phone is a necessary device. I remember growing up, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I was a student at the university, I didn't have a mobile phone. When I finally got to use a mobile phone, I never used phone calls.
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
The best innovations in computing have come through a paradigm IO change, right? When with GUI, and then with a graphical user interface, and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like AR is that next paradigm.
Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.
And by doing this, removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with, to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people, instead to a vast amount of pain imposed on a small number of people to have to actually make this work.
Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.
When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession.
But as fab costs increased, it became more and more burdensome for manufacturers to operate cutting edge manufacturing facilities due to the high costs, and fewer manufacturers had the production volume to spread those costs over.
Ben Strak's short and sweet Monday newsletter offers weekly inspiration to designers and anyone else curious about the world around them. A good example of how newsletters thrive on the authentic curiosity of the people who write them.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell This lesser known book from Orwell offers an illuminating glimpse into the arrogant, entitled, and self-pitying mindset of downwardly mobile elites.
Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.
So if you think about entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes one is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap.
Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.
Another book I wanted to mention in this context is a fairly obvious choice, Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which is a foundational book about the self, in particular because it reconnects emotion with rationality and the body.
If you're like me, I knew nothing about fonts, layouts or basic usage of text before I read this. This book uses great, full-color examples to explain the basics of designs. If you don't know the difference between a serif and a sans-serif font, this is a great place to start.
Who are the best engineers and designers in the world? Nature. This book is an interesting, science-heavy look at some really interesting properties in nature we could use to learn from as we try to design new technology. Benyus takes us across the spectrum from photosynthesis, to agriculture, to spiders. If you want to geek out on a little biology while applying it to technology this is a good read.
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now.
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.
Work that’s too fine, too early commits everyone to the wrong details. Designers and programmers need room to apply their own judgement and expertise when they roll up their sleeves and discover all the real trade-offs that emerge.
Regardless of what you say, any specific mockups are going to bias what other people do after you—especially if you’re in a higher position than them. They’ll take every detail in the initial mockups as direction even though you didn’t intend it.
T-Mobile doesn't come close to having the best coverage, but once you've experienced the wonders of free international roaming, you'll never use any other carrier.
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