Tessera

Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. aeon.co/essays/silic...

Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem | Aeon Essays

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future

aeon.co

"Large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing." lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/13/th...

The Tower Keeps Rising

Vibecoding and the possible collapse of a shared language.

lucumr.pocoo.org

"A tool might determine which design will improve completion rates. It cannot make completion rate the right goal on its own. That goal came from somewhere. Who decided what mattered most?" www.tannerchristensen.com/blog/product...

Product design in the age of AI — Tanner Christensen's blog

As AI makes design faster and cheaper, the value of designers shifts from producing artifacts to framing decisions and taking responsibility for the quality of what gets made.

tannerchristensen.com

Two of my favourite questions to ask about any product metric are: • What are you trying to learn? • What change will you make as a result? www.antmurphy.me/newsletter/m...

Measuring ≠ Learning — Ant Murphy

Why do most "must-track metrics" lists fail? Because tracking a metric without knowing what you'll learn from it — or what you'll change when it moves — turns dashboards into noise. Here's the…

antmurphy.me

Paper Shaders – Ultra-fast zero-dependency shaders shaders.paper.design

Paper Shaders – Ultra-fast zero-dependency shaders

Shaders for you to use in your projects, as React components or GLSL.

shaders.paper.design

As software primitives are being rewritten, this is a good time to embrace formlessness. It means keeping enough range to notice when a new practice is useful, and enough foundation to know when it is not. www.proofofconcept.pub/p/the-tao-of...

The Tao of Software Design

Issue 305: Deep in one craft, fluent across many

proofofconcept.pub

When a capable engineer can stand up a working version of a feature in an afternoon, effort stops being the constraint those models were built to “protect.” And when the denominator heads toward zero, the math gets strange. jgothelf.substack.com/p/how-to-pri...

How to prioritize an AI roadmap when effort estimates stop meaning anything

When everything is cheap to build, nothing is prioritized. Two questions now sort your roadmap better than effort ever did.

jgothelf.substack.com

Design engineering is best understood as a spectrum, not a single role. Historically it sat closer to design: prototyping, interaction work, design systems, and preserving product intent through implementation. marcelochaman.ca/s/design-eng...

Design Engineering | Marcelo Chaman

What design engineering is, how it's changed, and where it's going

marcelochaman.ca

There’s a pattern here. When earlier periods of skilled practice are treated as more fully human, the social order that produced them can easily appear better than what replaced it. The past, then, seems superior to the present. aeon.co/essays/the-r...

The radical reasons why you dream of making things by hand | Aeon Essays

Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work?

aeon.co

“The mind’s wandering is a source of creative ideas… The problem is not that our minds wander; it’s that they wander away from what matters.” That line matters because it exposes a modern lie: You can’t be “on” all the time.

The wandering mind: A gift we squander - Darius Foroux

Most people treat a wandering mind like a defect. They see it as a leak in their productivity bucket. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we aren’t staring at a screen or checking off a to-do…

dariusforoux.com

The missing piece is often the hardest one: “what the world needs.” It’s increasingly difficult to convince ourselves that much of what we’re building actually makes the world better.

The missing piece in your design career

Many senior designers feel burned out despite great salaries. The Japanese concept of ikigai reveals why — and what to do about it.

hardproblems.com

What stays yours is knowing what to build and why — which questions are worth exploring, what the patterns across your team’s work are telling you, and when to say no to something that’s technically possible but wrong for the product. medium.com/@maj0926/you...

Your AI Doesn’t Know Your Design System. Here’s How We Fixed That.

How one design team stopped getting HTML slop and started shipping real prototypes

medium.com

There’s an interesting side effect to our current stage of the LLM hype cycle: in the race for maximum agility, organizations have given it functionally unlimited trust. productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/trust-is-n...

Trust is not built on craft alone

No amount of tooling will let product teams move faster than being trusted to own their process. That trust is earned through rigor rather than mere velocity.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

A design system is meant to be the guardrail for the visual and interaction layer of a product, the cost of a weak design system isn't just inconsistency anymore, it's bad automation at scale. mandy.dev/posts/design... #DesignSystems

Design Systems Are No Longer Optional

Frontend notes, type experiments, and web things by Mandy Michael

mandy.dev

We are not in the future. It is still 2016. It is still 1986, if you are so inclined. We have hardly made any strides in our ability to define tasks and their context. productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/even-with-...

Even with a silver bullet, you still have to aim

Productivity gains among frontline employees can't counteract the abdication of responsibility at the executive level.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com