Deciding one UI call at a time
In today’s newsletter, I’ve got a lot of great content for you, including:
- Designing with AI
- Half-baked scribbles that end up on newsstands
- Thinking in systems, shipping in loops
- And 8 more
Most Interesting
Designing with AI
Buzz Usborne treats designing AI-powered products as a series of practical UI decisions and product design calls, made one at a time.
Design + Development
How Rob Farmer turns half-baked sketches into New York Times covers
Rob Farmer’s New York Times covers start as ugly, half-formed scribbles. The idea gets locked long before the drawing looks good, and most sketches die on the way there.
Small React packages that each do one visual effect well, then wrap around elements you already built. Animated borders, thinking indicators, voice-reactive glow. Installs from npm, written so a coding agent can wire it up for you.
Blurry before beautiful: native image previews for the web
Blurry image placeholders could become a built-in web feature. Patrick Brosset walks through a proposed previewsrc attribute that lets the browser load, show, and swap the preview for you. No more hand-rolled blur hacks.
Drop in an image, get ASCII art back. Everything runs locally in your browser, with adjustable width and styling, plus export to TXT, PNG, SVG, or HTML.
Tech + Innovation
How we made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks
Anthropic embedded Claude in Slack for a two-week performance sprint and cut claude.ai load times from 3.1 to 0.55 seconds. They measured every user journey separately and ran a review loop that shipped 3,000+ changes without breaking things.
Thinking in systems, shipping in loops
Tom Tunguz on how AI pushed software engineering toward system design. The work that matters now is feedback loops, verification, and getting agents to behave reliably.
Roberto Pieraccini on why AI fears feel so urgent. His take: the bigger risk comes from how people frame the technology and what they choose to do with it.
Work + Mindset
Boris Cherny plans products assuming he’s wrong
Boris Cherny’s six steps for attacking a product problem, from gathering information to acting with urgency. Rewriting the problem definition mid-flight feels like thrash to a team, and he argues that’s healthy. Plus the two failure modes he hits most.
Send the announcement yourself
Stay SaaSy on getting credit for work you already did. Pick one to three recurring public announcements to own based on your role, send the message yourself instead of delegating it, and deal with colleagues who quietly misrepresent your contributions.
Gabriel Valdivia on what AI didn’t make cheap. Execution costs almost nothing now, but real creation still takes judgment, persistence, and a vision nobody else has.
Matt Downey is a designer who has spent over two decades building digital businesses, now Head of Design at Atlas UP. He writes Digital Native, the newsletter for designers building in the AI era.
