Speed Without Discovery

In today's newsletter, I've got a lot of great content for you, including:

Design terminology, defined with precision
Rapid growth is testing Anthropic's founding promise
Every Figma shortcut you forgot in one place
And 7 more

Most Interesting

Highlighte.rs

A JavaScript library that draws realistic marker strokes over web text. Three nib styles, fluorescent colors, and marks that hold position through scrolling and resizing without breaking text selection. Works standalone or with React, Vue, and Svelte.

Design + Development

A Sharp Tool Can Still Ruin the Cut

A Shopify designer traces how AI tools quietly rewired their thinking (Perplexity replacing search, production code shipping faster than ever) and why speed without friction can leave you confident in understanding you never actually built.

Glass for the web

The Aave design team explains how they built a cross-browser glass refraction effect, why SVG and Canvas both fall short, and how their approach works across Chromium, Safari, and Firefox using real rendered HTML content.

Design Vocabulary

A glossary of design terms organized by category, starting with typography and color. Each entry gives a precise definition with context on when the concept applies. These are the words designers use when they know what they’re looking at.

Tech + Innovation

Loop Engineering

Addy Osmani calls it loop engineering: instead of prompting coding agents yourself, you build systems that do the prompting for you. He maps out the five core primitives (automations, worktrees, skills, plugins, sub-agents) and shows how Codex and Claude Code already support this pattern.

AI is Speeding up Delivery, but Who Decides What to Build?

Buzz Usborne argues AI discourse fixates on delivery speed while ignoring discovery: the harder work of deciding what to build. Designers who feel squeezed by AI tools but can't articulate why will find the distinction useful.

Inside Anthropic, the $965 Billion AI Juggernaut

Bloomberg's Emily Chang interviews Dario and Daniela Amodei on how Anthropic went from OpenAI breakaway to Pentagon contractor, and whether a company growing this fast can still credibly claim safety as its mission.

Work + Mindset

How a Slack Designer Validated Decisions Before Writing Production Code

A Slack designer used AI-assisted coding to build stress-test prototypes before any production decisions were made. Two real projects, including a max-width strategy tested against 272 million sessions, replaced Figma guesswork with simulation-backed evidence.

The Cockpit Era of UX is Ending

John Maeda argues the next interface isn't a screen. It's intent. Drawing on blindness, VoiceOver, and Don Norman's two gulfs, he makes the case that AI collapses the need to operate software at all. He calls what comes next AX: agent experience.

SHRTCTS

is an interactive 3D keyboard for learning the shortcuts of the apps you use every day. Pick a tool, browse its full shortcut list, hover any action, and the exact keys you'd press light up on the keyboard.