AI, Agents, and What Developers Actually Do Now

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

How sharp is your eye for UI animation?
7,258 devs on what AI actually changed
What AI can't absorb from your codebase
And 7 more

Most Interesting

Train Your Judgment

Emil Kowalski runs side-by-side animation exercises: pick the better motion, write down why, then check your reasoning against his breakdown. It's a structured way to build vocabulary and critique instincts for UI animation: useful when AI is generating the motion and you're the one deciding what's good.

Design + Development

Domain Knowledge is the Leverage

As AI agents absorb routine coding work, what actually differentiates developers is domain knowledge. Modular design, clear interfaces, and explicit specs make codebases more agent-friendly, and understanding system boundaries and business context is becoming the job.

Tools the Vercel Product Design Team Actually Uses

Hannah Hearth walks through what Vercel's product designers actually run day to day: AI agents across coding and design workflows, parallel agent threads, browser-based UI experimentation, production-linked design, and a handful of non-AI tools for debugging and collaboration.

Stack Overflow is Dying, and Developers Stopped Noticing

Questions on Stack Overflow have collapsed. CSS-Tricks traces what replaced them (AI tools, scattered docs, private Slacks) and what gets lost when developers stop asking publicly: the searchable record that taught the next person.

Tech + Innovation

OpenAI Has the Smarter Model. Anthropic is Winning Anyway.

Anthropic is beating OpenAI in enterprise not by winning benchmarks, but by owning the platform layer: agents, tools, and the infrastructure companies actually build on.

Speech Has Crossed a Threshold: Agents Do the Rest

Inferterra makes the case that dictation is now the better default for knowledge work. The argument: once speech input clears a quality bar, you can separate thinking from execution, and let agents handle most of the latter.

Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-training Team

Karpathy previously left OpenAI and Tesla, but now leads a team at Anthropic using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. TechCrunch also covers what happens to his education startup Eureka Labs, and what his move signals about Anthropic's competitive position.

Work + Mindset

How to Enter Side Doors

Maja from Velvet Noise makes the case for getting useful before you're invited. The piece covers how to spot overlooked entry points into projects and companies, and why waiting for formal openings is often the slowest route in.

How 7,258 Web Developers Actually Use AI in 2026

A survey of 7,258 web developers on how AI is reshaping their work: covering coding agents, model providers, tool adoption, and opinions on productivity and AGI. Organized into scannable sections built for product and strategy decisions. Ideas Mental models, patterns, and frameworks on thinking clearly, building well, and living with intention. Distilled from hundreds of books, podcasts, videos, and years of paying close attention. Definitely worth a bookmark.