Holy shit. Using the Compound Engineering plugin and Fable, I planned out an iPad port of my app this morning. Then before dinner, kicked off Codex on the goal of implementing it. 4 hours later, it’s alive!!!!
Roger Wong
@lunarboy.com
Design leader writing about AI and the future of product design. 20+ yrs at Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, BuildOps. rogerwong.me
Trying out Codex in the terminal… I'm sorry, but Claude Code is more beautiful and considered. Maybe I'm just used to it, but Codex feels very unfinished from a UI standpoint.
Just in time for San Diego Comic Con! @sandiegocomic-con.bsky.social I made a full schedule explorer app. It's super fast and even contains a relatedness graph view so you can explore by genre, franchise, or even people. Best of all, it's free...
Working on something kind of fun. The @sandiegocomic-con.bsky.social schedule is notoriously terrible. With nearly 3,500 events over 5 days and 51 rooms/venues, it's an information nightmare. SDCC's app and site aren't great. So I decided on Friday to see if I can make a better one. #sdcc2026
Regarding macOS Tahoe and the requirement of squircle app icons, I think it's an accessibility play by Apple. Here, in Mac OS X 10.4, I'm trying to click in the blank space around the shape. Didn't work. 1/
Been writing about designers-as-orchestrators for a year. "Editorial" is the better word. Orchestrator suggests conducting players who already know their parts. Editorial means standing over the whole portfolio, deciding what belongs and what gets killed. 1/2
Designers and PMs are writing markdown files like DESIGN.md or SOUL.md for their agents. The files hold what used to live in our heads as taste. New newsletter: newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/out-of-you...
You ever get the feeling that Claude Opus 4.7 was trained only on Willam Gibson novels?
AI tools agree with everyone. They're designed to. They remove the friction that used to keep design honest, and whoever learns to put that friction back is doing the actual work.
Spent Sunday afternoon with Claude Design working on my cousin's preschool site. First draft: B-. Four dozen micro-tweaks later: A. The tool gave me a head start. Taste did the rest. rogerwong.me/2026/04/sund...
A Sunday Afternoon with Claude Design - Roger Wong
A hands-on look at Claude Design through a preschool website redesign, with reactions from designers on where it fits alongside Figma and Claude Code.
rogerwong.me
We're getting good at accelerating design work. Automating it is still hazy. AI will ship a passable prototype in minutes, but it can't tell you where your judgment goes when the model handles production.
Acceleration is not automation. Engineers crossed the line this year: four agents in parallel, wiped out by 11am. Design hasn't. Faster PRDs and prototypes are acceleration. Automation needs specialist agent teams, with your judgment shaping the output.
LinkedIn's working Full Stack Builders all spent years as specialists first. That's the part of Tomer Cohen's pitch that nags me. They flex because they built taste one lane at a time. The new APB program bets juniors can skip that phase and still develop the judgment. I'm not convinced. 1/
Intercom, Cisco, and Figma all landed on the same answer: design's value is at the beginning and the end. Agents own the middle. The catch: the middle is where junior designers built judgment. We're compressing the workflow and the career ladder at the same time.
When factories got electric motors in the 1880s, they swapped the steam engine and changed nothing else. For 30 years, output barely moved. Most teams are doing the same thing with AI. I wrote more about this: newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-factory-hasnt-been-redesigned
The Factory Hasn’t Been Redesigned Yet
The productivity everyone's chasing lives on the other side of a redesign nobody's started.
newsletter.rogerwong.me
Designers, we’re in the messy middle stuck between two ends. Do you defend “designer” as a role or follow the skill of design? I explore this in my latest newsletter.
Defend the Role or Follow the Skill
The messy middle was never a phase. It was the whole job description.
open.substack.com
The design profession got exactly what it asked for: less time pushing pixels, more room for strategy. Most of us are using that time to argue about what designers should be instead. newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-territ...
The Territory You Haven’t Claimed
The tools are ready. The demand is real. So what's stopping us?
newsletter.rogerwong.me
Jenny Wen’s "ship fast, iterate publicly, build trust through speed" approach makes sense for Anthropic. They're building greenfield AI products where nobody knows the right interaction patterns yet.
The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) - Roger Wong
Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic. Prior to this, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. Before that, she was a designer at Dropbox, Square...
rogerwong.me
In case you’re looking to switch chatbots, say from a four-syllable one to a single-syllable one: claude.com/import-memory
Switch to Claude without starting over | Claude
Transfer your preferences, projects, and context from other AI providers into Claude. Switch without losing what makes your AI useful.
claude.com
Developers and designers are independently grieving the same thing right now, and it took me a while to realize they’re not mourning the skill but the tribe. The community that used to care about the craft now feels like it’s about speed, or pulling a slot machine lever on prompts. 1/
I thought the same thing. This might be the inflection point and NOT “AI-washing” as in the earlier layoffs from Amazon, Meta, etc.
Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 5mo agoI think this will be a watershed moment in tech similar to Elon's layoffs at Twitter in 2022. AI coding agents crossed the threshold in December and this is the beginning of the fallout. "we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong." - Jack Dorsey
Boom. I’m glad @anthropic.com is not caving in. Anti-mass domestic surveillance and anti-autonomous murderbots are moral red lines to have.
Just published a new newsletter wrapping up the theme of last week. Design is changing fast due to the new AI tools. Bleeding edge Silicon Valley companies have already made the shift. Our days of drawing pictures of designs to be implemented are numbered.
Stop Drawing Pictures of Software
AI is pushing designers out of Figma and into the material they actually ship.
open.substack.com
Everywhere I look, there’s a new ASCII project. I think it’s sort of a halo effect from Claude Code and the nostalgia designers and developers have for terminals. Anyway, I wrote a roundup of stuff that’s caught my eye. #designsky
ASCII Me - Roger Wong
ASCII and text-based art are making a comeback: a personal roundup of ASCII art, animated clouds, glyph tools, Mermaid diagrams, and terminal UIs and nostalgia.
rogerwong.me
I pointed Claude Code at our design system and got a working screen in three prompts. Didn’t open Figma once. That’s the part of my job I’ve spent decades doing—drawing pictures of apps and handing them to someone else to build. 1/
Product Design Is Changing - Roger Wong
Product design is changing: AI shifts work from Figma mockups to design in code, centering orchestration, machine-readable design systems and human judgment.
rogerwong.me