G'day, I'm Brody MacLean, a multi-disciplinary design lead from Sydney, Australia. :-)

Design is always going to be a competitive advantage. By sweating the details, you can create a product that is so good, users don’t want to leave.

Christina Wodtke, writing on her blog:

The most useful model might not win.

What wins is the model that people don’t want to leave. The one that feels like home. The one where switching would mean losing something—not just access to features, but fluency, comfort, all those intangible things that make a tool feel like yours.

Amazon figured this out with Prime. Apple figured it out with the ecosystem. Salesforce figured it out by making itself so embedded in enterprise workflows that ripping it out would require an act of God.

AI companies are still acting like this is a pure technology competition. It’s not. It’s a competition to become essential—and staying power comes from experience, not raw capability.

Your moat isn’t your model. Your moat is whether users feel at home.

Anthropic’s internal study shows that AI is really changing the way engineers work. It helps them get more done and develop new skills, but there’s also concern about losing some of their deep technical knowledge and how teamwork and mentoring might be affected.

The study reminds us that it’s important to address these challenges early on, and it suggests that what Anthropic is experiencing could be a glimpse into bigger societal shifts ahead.

Several AI agents were tested to see if they would break assigned rules when faced with deadlines and other kinds of pressure.

Google Gemini 2.5 was the worst offender, breaking rules 79% of the time under pressure. Even under zero pressure, the AI agents still broke assigned rules 19% of the time.

Emily Campbell has compiled a list of the main AI patterns, including summaries, common uses, considerations, and examples.