Dave @DavidPRoyer

Making a functioning prototype is intoxicating. And now, anyone can do it. The trap is mistaking our astonishment at what we were able to make for evidence that what we made is good. We need to be able to throw away and redraw prototypes as quickly as we erase whiteboards, and with the same level of detachment. We must guard against whole teams getting distracted by searching for merit in bad protos just because their makers (often oneself, btw) are dazzled by the magic of what AI can produce. “Slop grenade” is such a useful term to name this phenomenon.

Shane Parrish @shaneparrish

3 weeks ago

Lazy work used to mean too little output. Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else. @tobi call it "slop grenades." A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it). Someone else

149 655 5K 1.5M 3K

@thefinnmckenty finally, a voice of reason. well said

The job is to figure out what needs to be made, then work with the team to make it. That job will never go away, the details will just change. Don’t get attached to any specific tool or technology, those come and go.

Frank Bach @zendadddy

2 months ago

I don't really know that 'pure design' will exist in the next 6-12mo.

36 2 158 31K 46

@nick_blanche rapid exploration, especially when it comes to UI text. Explain to AI what I'm trying to communicate to users (in many words) and ask it to write me 5 versions of succinct UI text to communicate that. I also have it do this type of exploration for UIs and occasionally get value

@nick_blanche for any far-out product vision, instead of mocking it up in figma I use claude design and save tons of time (1 hr vs a couple days). The details are off and it's clearly AI designed it but it still works as a vision artifact for alignment/discussion

I've heard this too many times now. "We cycled through a few different Heads of Product... they never work out." The pattern looks like this... 1. Founders notice they aren't shipping product. 2. They think a Head of Product will fix it. 3. Head of Product comes in, and spends time/energy at the "strategy" level of framing. 4. The strategy from the Head of Product misses the mark. 5. Founders realize they probably have better ideas about strategy. 6. Founders explain what's important to the Head of Product. 7. Head of Product doesn't have the right skills to translate "this is what we want to solve" to a blueprint of what to specifically build. In the end, it's a mix of wrong output and no output. What went wrong here? The #1 mismatch I see is that founders don't know what to expect from the Head of Product, and vice versa. Founders think they should delegate strategy, which is often not the case. Heads of Product think they should contribute strategy, which is often not the case. What's missing is this ... very often Founders have a good nose for what needs to get solved. What they need is someone who can NARROW DOWN and TRANSLATE that into a specific concept with good UX that's technically legible. But instead what happens is both compete for the "set the strategy" role. And nobody is problems into frames into shapes to go build. My #1 advice to founders thinking they need a head of product. Ask yourself: do you actually NOT know what you want, strategically? Are you really looking to outsource strategy? If it's not actually about bringing in someone from outside to set the direction for your whole product ... then you need someone who is skilled ONE LEVEL DOWN in concreteness. Meaning someone who can listen to you about what matters, whiteboard the solution that pulls it all together, and work with technical people to make it happen. There is a HUGE gap in the market today. We need product people who can work ABOVE the level of Figma-visuals and BELOW the level of "company strategy". So much work of getting to what we actually ship — the blueprint — is in-between. And let me tell you ... if you EVER go to a product conference, prepare to be deeply misled. There are WAY TOO MANY talks about "strategy" when nobody in the room is truly responsible for strategy. Product is ultimately about understanding the purpose and translating that into a specific design. A Head of Product who can't whiteboard a UI flow or make technical trade-offs with engineers isn't heading product. They're trying to play CEO.

@brettmandel same bro same - always next year

@Joseph_Paul_V nice - those last couple blocks going east on Washington are DICEY

I think about this Seinfeld interview all the time.

@PhillyGov more dog pee for you then I guess

This is what the craziness in the White House is about. Trump’s budget includes: $1 billion for his White House ballroom. $1 billion in cuts to the National Park Service. We should be investing in the needs of the working class, not more of the President's vanity projects.

@Joshua_Ariza extra points if the company does dystopian govt surveillance. very subversive, very cool

@soleio Speaking of social media weaponizing fear for engagement. But do go on... 🤡

The profit motive will end life on Earth if we let it

David Corn @DavidCornDC

5 months ago

BIG MOTHER JONES SCOOP: There are many unresolved health/environmental concerns with glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup), but the USG keeps letting farmers, companies and public agencies spray it all over—including, as we learned, in America’s forests. motherjones.com/politics/2026/…

32 781 2K 359K 255

Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology. My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same. Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep. The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression. Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas. But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market. The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon. These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense. No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all. Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade. Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.

Guillermo Rauch @rauchg

6 months ago

Whether design belongs in Figma or Claude Design is a distraction from a bigger shift. 1️⃣ Design will become autonomous. More helpful to think of it as 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙸𝙶𝙽.𝚖𝚍, used by your coding agents running your software factory. 2️⃣ Specialized “personal” design tools generated

79 106 1K 368K 2K

@billy_penn "For most cyclists, just like car drivers, the question of “where can I safely park” arises before they leave home, and can often lead them to opt for alternative forms of transportation." 🤣

@minhsmind @scottbelsky What tools do you use to vibe code websites? I'd be curious to see one!

@nickclement If you're not throwing around ideas by sketching and going straight to Figma then you have no taste nor care for the creative process.

Every time you swipe to a new 30-second video, your brain releases a small pulse of dopamine in anticipation of what might come next. This is what neuroscientists call a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, the same mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive form of gambling. The uncertainty does the work. And the feed delivers it 270 times per day. The average TikTok user consumes 167 to 271 videos per day. Each one is 21 to 34 seconds long. That’s a dopamine pulse every half-minute for hours. Your nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, adapts to that cadence. It recalibrates what “normal stimulation” feels like. When you then sit down with a novel or a crossword puzzle, your brain registers the low stimulation as aversive. You feel restless. You reach for your phone. That restlessness is withdrawal operating below conscious awareness. The data on this is now stacking up. Average attention span on social media dropped from 12 seconds in 2015 to 8.25 seconds in 2025. Teens toggle between apps every 44 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes a decade ago. 52% of people now skip videos longer than 60 seconds even when they’re interested in the topic. Here’s the part that changes the conversation. Researchers interrupted participants during a task with either TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube, then asked them to resume. After TikTok, accuracy dropped to barely above random guessing. Twitter and YouTube showed zero measurable impact. The short-form feed format specifically degrades prospective memory, your ability to hold an intention across a time gap. The prefrontal cortex, which governs sustained attention and impulse control, doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. An entire generation is training that circuitry on rapid context switching 270 times per day. The brain wires to whatever you repeatedly expose it to. Full stop. Puzzles, board games, long novels, long-form video. These function as something like resistance training for the prefrontal cortex. They require sustained effort without algorithmic reward. That’s the point. The discomfort you feel 10 minutes into a book after a week of heavy scrolling is the same discomfort you feel on rep 8 of a hard set. The adaptation is on the other side of it. Your brain adapted to the feed. The same plasticity that allowed that works in reverse. But you have to actually put it under load.

Rissa @rissa_kimmy

7 months ago

Please get back to doing puzzles, sudoku, board games, crosswords, word search. Read long novels and watch long form videos. Seeing my students and even my age-mates uncomfortable being cognitively unentertained is... something. We’re losing patience with thinking deeply.

143 19K 90K 1.6M 10K