Bookmarks
A collection of interesting resources, links, and bookmarks I've saved.
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Posted 2d ago
Product design is fundamentally changing as AI shifts the focus from Figma mockups to code-based orchestration and machine-readable systems, elevating the designer’s role in visible, user-facing quality that automation can’t fully replicate
Design leads spend about 80% of their time on communication, alignment, and justification. Not on hands-on design work. Every design decision carries a “justification tax”: the time spent explaining, documenting, and defending choices that other disciplines make in a quick conversation.
AI should be targeting that 80%, not the mockup work. Use it to synthesise meeting notes, draft stakeholder communications, generate research summaries, and build quick prototypes that settle debates with data instead of opinions.
Product Design Is Changing
rogerwong.me
Product Design Is Changing
rogerwong.me
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Posted 3d ago
Every product reaches a point where it becomes too complex to be useful in order to meet the needs of the business.
The biggest problem is that product teams are incentivised to add more features, not to improve the foundations of the product, so it’s impressive, at Slacks trajectory in 2020, that they were self-aware enough to identify and address things from the ground up.
We found ourselves shipping a kitchen drawer full of useful tools to our customers – knives and forks, spatulas and whisks, tongs and corkscrews, hell even a few citrus zesters and melon ballers – but everything was so jammed together that you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Look out for the mandolin in the back.
It was a mess. We were at a tipping point of product complexity. While we were preoccupied re-engineering our codebase into a scalable service and reorganizing our company into a public-ready business, our product had suffered. Inertia, complexity, and feature creep had caught up to us. Entropy was setting in.
Rethinking Slack
buildingslack.com
Rethinking Slack
buildingslack.com
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Posted Jan 31
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
A ton of stuff here applies to Design and Product too.
Ian Tracey discusses the evolving landscape of software engineering, emphasising a “K-shaped” future where some skills become increasingly valuable while others diminish.
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
ian.so
The K-Shaped Future of Software Engineering
ian.so
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Posted Jan 23
The musings of Fabricio Teixeira on what he loves about design and what he’s learned along the way.
Lessons of Design
lessons.design
Lessons of Design
lessons.design
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Posted Jan 12
I have to admit, I have to agree with Jason Fried on this one — and admit that my house has a lot of these problems.
Neither my wife nor I could tell you what each of the buttons on our Philips Hue tap dial switches do. So much so that I’ve had to set a reminder to turn on all our lights and disable the auto-lock from the front door when the cleaners are coming.
Which reminds me…
Jason Fried writes on his blog:
The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up.
Thermostats… Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling.
And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.
The big regression
world.hey.com
The big regression
world.hey.com
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Posted Jan 6
A very well crafted essay from Nikita Prokopov.
If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item.
Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations every step of the way — that this is a terrible idea in the first place, and that Apple has implemented it poorly.
Sequoia → Tahoe 
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
tonsky.me
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
tonsky.me
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Posted Dec 29, 2025
The craft bar keeps rising. Good is no longer good enough, and taste becomes leverage. Designers, PMs & engineers with strong product taste will stand out.
Tom Scott writes on his blog:
- AI is making the best designers more productive
- Hands-on is the new default, regardless of level
- You need to be fluent in systems NOT just pixels
- The role of a ‘designer’ will shift to being a curator.
- Show actual work to find a new job
- Design/eng/product roles are merging QUICK
The future of product design
verifiedinsider.substack.com
The future of product design
verifiedinsider.substack.com
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Posted Dec 16, 2025
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.
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
hey.paris
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
hey.paris
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Posted Dec 15, 2025
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.
The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering
yannglt.com
The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering
yannglt.com
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Posted Dec 11, 2025
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.
UX Is Your Moat (And You’re Ignoring It)
eleganthack.com
UX Is Your Moat (And You’re Ignoring It)
eleganthack.com
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Posted Dec 4, 2025
How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic
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.
How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic
anthropic.com
How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic
anthropic.com
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Posted Nov 27, 2025
How AI Agents Misbehave When Faced With Real-World Pressures
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.
How AI Agents Misbehave When Faced With Real-World Pressures
spectrum.ieee.org
How AI Agents Misbehave When Faced With Real-World Pressures
spectrum.ieee.org