Issue #754: Components are dead
Design is how it tastes, 9 designers open up about AI-assisted coding, Design process, meet agent process, Product quality, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings - Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot. - Granola promoted
- Components are dead - Tokens are the layer we can still control. And if we let go of the instinct to componentise every single surface of the product, we might actually be able to build faster, at greater scale, and stay just as consistent, maybe more. - Luis Ouriach
- Design is how it tastes - If our design specs only tell models what the interface is made of, they have already forgotten what the interface is for. - Jem Gold
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- 9 designers open up about AI-assisted coding - Some see it as an invigorating return to what brought them to the discipline in the first place, from the joy of creating to finally being able to sweat the details that separate a mediocre product from a great one. - Ron Goldin
- Design process, meet agent process - Designers already have the mental model for all of this, in fact we've had it for decades. - Simon Corry
- Product quality - Craft isn’t perfectionism. Perfectionism is self-indulgent: it optimizes for the maker’s satisfaction. Craft is empathetic: it optimizes for the person on the other side. We’re not doing art. We’re designing for others. - Miguel Fernandez
Artificial intelligence
- The dark arts of skill engineering - Rather than thinking of a skill as a saved prompt the user or agent can retrieve as needed, think of a skill as a plugin: an extension of the harness. - Paul Bakaus
Design engineering
- Rebuilding FIFA standings layout with CSS Subgrid - Thanks to subgrid, we can nest a grid on the inner items. That means we can have two children positioned at the start and end of the shared grid. - Ahmad Shadeed
- Not tokens - The question to ask before creating any token is simple: will this value ever need to change independently of the property it's applied to? - Donnie D'Amato
Inspiration and creativity
- A side project is the fastest way to upskill in the age of AI - The one piece of career advice I'm giving everyone right now is to get a side project. - Phil Morton
Tools and resources
- Canvas UI: Creative canvas and WebGL component library - An open source library of tasteful html-in-canvas & WebGL components. Framework agnostic. Copy, paste, ship. - David Haz
Last but not least
- Sculpting a shapeless medium - I think about it like — if you had to understand what a codebase is from the commit logs, that's kind of what we're doing with agent chats. - Ryan Mather, Amelia Wattenberger, Federico Villa, Robin Chen