Issue #756: The last product design tool
The naked designer, The "AI can do the UX" mistake, A design language is more than a visual theme, Friction as a feature, and more.
Highlights of the week
- The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings - Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot. - Granola promoted
- The last product design tool - The final interface lives in code, which is where it should live – we are software designers, after all. - Mariusz Cieśla
- The naked designer - When making something is no longer evidence you meant it, there's nowhere left to hide. - Matthew Santone
Read all week, picked once. The best design links — every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- The "AI can do the UX" mistake - AI has made it much easier for designers to become builders. It has not made it equally easy for builders to become designers. - Robin Cannon
- A design language is more than a visual theme - Composability creates room to shape. A design language teaches teams what to shape toward. - Yesenia Perez-Cruz
- Friction as a feature - Before AI, writing code was expensive, so the cost of building imposed a higher threshold on which ideas survived long enough to be built. - Emil Kowalski
Design engineering
- How to test a Figma Design System with Claude Code and figma-cli - A snapshot, a contract per component, and a check that catches drift, unbound tokens, and broken variants — no MCP server needed. - Sil Bormüller
- 3D CSS guide - The leap from that painted stage to a world you move a camera through is the same leap CSS lets you make, and it's smaller than it looks. - Carmen Ansio
- The CSS lh unit - The line height unit (lh) has been around for a while and I rarely see people sharing how they use it. - Ahmad Shadeed
Tools and resources
- The State of CSS 2026 survey results are out - The CSS of 2026 would be unrecognizable to our distant ancestors from the early 2000s. - Devographics, Sacha Greif
- 76 open research questions in AI usability - Watch 10 users, code what happens, report honestly, and you'll know something nobody else knows. - Jakob Nielsen
Inspiration and creativity
- Novelty - Novelty is the equivalent of an exclamation mark. Akin to seasoning, you don't want too much of it. - Rauno Freiberg
- The hierarchy of competence - Nine stages, in order, and the order isn't decorative. Each stage is only reachable from the one below it, and skipping a rung doesn't produce a shortcut, it produces a specific and recognizable failure. - Hardik Pandya
Last but not least
- The prototype was a beautiful lie - How our design team stopped mocking things up and started building them — inside the real repo, with a git branch and zero prior GitHub experience. - Margarita Skiada