Design links for March 17, 2026

Our latest research highlights the skills designers need to meet the moment.

A design crit should implement strategic participant roles, 24-hour context share, and rigorous prioritization frameworks.

AI tools hit a true inflection point in late 2025. Building things got cheaper. AI tools got expensive.

If you’ve been building web for a while, you probably remember the mess of six million files in your head element just to have a well-supported favicon.

How we look at the stacking order of our projects, how we choose z-index values, and more importantly, the implications of those choices.

Recently, I was searching for a way to style an element depending on whether it was ever focused.

As AI speeds up design work, the argument to "throw out the process" misrepresents how experienced designers work.

In my recent Designing AI Products talk, I outlined several of the lessons we've learned building AI-native companies over the past four years.

Large companies spent years rewarding the representation of work over the work itself. In the AI era, that has led to a crisis.

The thinking, trade-offs, and tools behind our design refresh.

A mental model for thinking about all the big changes that are happening as a single transition.

The messy middle was never a phase. It was the whole job description.

Great interfaces rarely come from a single thing. It's usually a collection of small things that compound into a great experience.

shadcn was never designed to be shipped vanilla.

We need more people to be thoughtfully and meaningfully critical of the things that are made.

Why the most important distinction in vibe coding is the one nobody's talking about.

Will AI agents kill design as we know it?

Go to the problem.

AI chats generate simple UI elements to gather context, reduce typing and memory load, and produce more useful, personalized results.

Use Figma MCP if you want to copy design from Claude and Figma Console if you want to achieve next step - letting AI agents edit design directly.

The visual feedback tool for agents.

I fundamentally believe that most people working to create things and put them out into the world are doing it because they want to make the world a better place.

Discover and install skills for AI agents.

It's time to retire that icon wrapper component.

Every hour spent getting the design right is an hour saved on prompting, iterating, and debugging downstream.

Teaching AI what designers know so it can work with us, not around us.