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

An interesting ongoing story about the fragility of your digital life and howeven a single dependancy failing could brick your entire life.

Another good reason to backup and move towards a file over app setup.

Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison writing on his blog:

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse.

For a long time, I’ve been dipping my toe across to the “engineering rail” to help guide the implmentation in code but it’s more and more obvious that my impact would be greatest if I made a more intentional move to overlap both rails.

Yann-Edern Gillet, writing on his blog:

The real Rosetta Stone didn’t solve languages, it overlapped them. Same meaning, carved three times, so people could decode one through the other. Design engineering is the same: we’re constantly trying to express intent twice — once visually, once in code, without losing the meaning in between.⁠

Design engineering isn’t about merging roles. It’s not about “one person doing everything.” It’s about live translation.⁠

The job isn’t to switch sides. It’s to stay on the track and keep both rails aligned. It’s not about roles, it’s about function.⁠

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.