Very excited about Interface Studies by @mskayyali.com—videos explicating and discussing ideas and problems in user interface design. buff.ly/laz8yko (via @kevinlynagh.com—thanks!!)

"Save for Later" Has No Later

Join "Interface Studies" to help make more videos. Your support keeps new content coming. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqv7gk4p_rB4nRz0j7B5yFA/join Almost every app today has a bookmark button.…

youtube.com

Of friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two camps: a) Controlled: 1-2min cycles, no context switching, still in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster" b) Delegated: Vibed in the background, while something else (eg design) is their primary focus

Delightful interactive tour through dozens of tiny muscle-memory-and-flow-promoting interface details: aresluna.org/show-your-ha...

Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you

On designing finger-friendly interactions

aresluna.org

Could I possibly nerd-snipe anyone into polishing something like this non-modal update flow into an official UI for Sparkle? weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/04/28/u...

Thinking about "creative time density": how many person-hrs/yrs went into this specific artifact/place/experience? It's a reliable awe trigger for me. Performers spending 100s of hours prepping a few minutes of material for a show, a scholar spending a decade on a book, a Ghibli film, cathedrals.

A distressingly high % of the prose I see online is now AI-generated. It feels like I'm playing a coordination game in which a rising fraction of the world is defecting? Then there's also a sense of insult—like, "did you think I wouldn't notice?" And: "wait, do others not notice?" It's not subtle!

Intense vertigo thinking about @nanr.bsky.social's numbers. Based on current pledges/valuations, AI philanthropic giving would saturate an additional 300+ Arc Institutes, i.e. an extra 80K employees. Or 5,000 Institutes for Progress demanding 200K employees! nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-...

Trying to form a theory for the widespread rise of daylight-blue and mismatched color-temp bulbs in commercial lodging. Feels like more than half the time I travel now, even at nice hotels, I flip a switch, yelp at the light, turn it back off again. That was less common 5+ years ago. Why?

HCI folkS: I'll be in Barcelona this Thu-Sun for CHI. Ping me if you'd like to hang!

⭐ New talk! Watch / read / visually skim here: andymatuschak.org/tat Coding agents might help us finally break out of two cages: the app model, which traps computing in one-size-fits-all silos; and programming as a specialization, which has crowded out cultures of imagination and domain insight.

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

andymatuschak.org

Underrated "feature" of AIM / IRC: you could only send people messages if they were online! Sort of built-in backpressure. If you're busy, you won't sign on much, so you won't end up with a "big unread count". Feels so quaint now, like a little village. Say hi to your friends during passeggiata…

I've often complained that interface design lacks great textbooks—still mostly taught through apprenticeship and trial/error. Interface Craft is shaping up to be a great resource, particularly for polish and craft. interfacecraft.dev The step-by-step UI crit/redesigns are a really nice format.

Yes, yes, outstanding buff.ly/8gbKvke Skimming through the figures, I saw… "IHOP Transgression". Wh—what is IHOP Transgression? Apparently their omelettes (and burritos??) contain pancake batter! As for the dark abyss: wouldn't popovers go there? (1:1:1) Or choux pastry, at 2:2:1 milk:eggs:flour?

When I'm using coding agents and LLMs extensively in some tasks, I feel way more resistance to grappling with difficult, uneven problems in others. As if I get recalibrated to expect ease, effortlessness, velocity in everything. Not good! Curious how you deal with this, if you feel it too.

Boston-area mutuals: I'll be giving the MIT HCI seminar this Tuesday at 4PM. I've got some open time on Wednesday morning—DM me if you'd like to chat! 👋

HCI Seminar - Andy Matuschak - Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies | MIT CSAIL

Abstract:One of the personal computer revolution’s grandest dreams was that we'd all have not only our own computers, but that we’d also create our own dynamic media, exquisitely tuned to our own…

buff.ly

Every night this house is full-on blue and red inside. I like to imagine it’s like a cold-plunge sauna, where the occupants alternate between the rooms as needed to dial in their melatonin

Prototypers: do you still see a role for semi-high-fidelity modalities like Origami? Or just straight from sketchbook/mocks to vibecode?

Confused: exciting new UIs seem rare in large part because inventing them requires both programming and imaginative design skills. It’s rare to find both in one person, and hard to coordinate in a dyad. But then: why does this kind of invention seem more common in games?

I always forget this skew: the shortest day of the year is in a few days, but the earliest sunset was earlier this month! Afternoons are already getting brighter (well, by two minutes)

Fond of mini index cards for outlining and synthesizing. Each is big enough to hold a real chunk, but small enough that I can get a lot on the table and "see it all" at once. Cards are nicer than stickies for this: gotta rearrange and stack.

A mnemonic for the univariate normal PDF, to the tune of My Favorite Things: One over square root of two pi times sigma E to the negative one half times z squared

After the critical failure of Merrily…, Sondheim thought about quitting music to make video games. I’ve wondered what they would be like. Today I found this email exchange—apparently, didactic?! Hard to imagine. www.nypl.org/blog/2022/07...

Was David Lynch describing the jhanas in his account of transcendental meditation? (from Catching the Big Fish)

Alan Kay once said: "Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must only work on great ideas, not good ones." Inspiring, and exasperating. I've been grappling with it for years, on and off.

This is an appreciation thread for EuterPen, a multimodal music notation system by Vincent Cavez et al. It aims to support the non-linear process of exploration during composition. It's the most sensitive and imaginative academic HCI design work I've seen in quite some time!

This was a nice anthology of brief interviews with artist collaborators and collectives. I've been curious to learn more about these scenes as I noodle on how I want to structure collaborations in my own work. Some excerpts below…

We oil our butcher block countertop every few months. Over ~8 years, it's soaked up ~12 liters of mineral oil. That's a lot of volume! Where does it go?

Striking how much this case can be made through verbatim quotes from OAI execs. notforprivategain.org Steelmanning that the proposed restructuring advances the non-profit's mission, the best I've got is "race dynamics—gotta up the stakes and win… so we can ensure things go well!" 👎 Got better?

Not For Private Gain

We write in opposition to OpenAI’s proposed restructuring that would transfer control of the development and deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) from a nonprofit charity to a for-profi...

notforprivategain.org

Probably like most people here, I get too much email, and especially too many invitations for meetings. One tactic I like for cold inbounds like "I'm working on X! Want to meet?" is: "Send me memos/designs/prototypes to get the conversation started?"

For a few years, I've had weekly 2-3hr readings for a course. It's a startling barometer: if I'd spent a while on X/YouTube/etc in the prior 48 hours, I'll want to distract myself every few minutes. But if I've been scrolling-free, it'll be easy to settle in for an unbroken hour!