Taste Over Templates
In today’s newsletter, I’ve got a lot of great content for you, including:
- Design is how it tastes
- The dopamine hit coding used to give
- Why you should send that cold email
- And 7 more
Most Interesting
Design Process, Meet Agent Process
Foundry, Simon Corry’s free MIT-licensed agent workflow, maps design’s Double Diamond onto AI coding: plans instead of pixels, five-round crits instead of vibes checks, handoff notes replacing memory loss.
Design + Development
Jem Chen redesigned Superposition by feeding Claude prompts like ‘palo santo and frankincense’ instead of a DESIGN.md file. Diffusion models now translate embodied sensation directly into layout, color, and spacing decisions.
Jim Nielsen spots AI’s visual tics: sparkle emojis, shimmering ‘thinking’ text, tiny icons in desktop apps like Claude and Cursor, and whack-a-mole toggles that repaint the whole UI.
A free animated component library for motion-heavy UI. Pick, preview, and customize components, then copy production-ready code for Framer, React, or MCP-integrated agents. Skip building polished animations from scratch.
Tech + Innovation
Anthropic runs a cookbook of 80+ guides, covering agent orchestration, memory, RAG, tool use, and evals, updated with entries through June 2026.
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
A Pydantic maintainer wakes to 30 AI-written PRs every morning. His verdict: reviewing code now feels worse than writing it did.
A Practical Guide to Reducing Token Spend
Adam Jacob cut a code review agent’s token use 8x and runtime 2x by replacing a coordinator agent with deterministic swamp code.
Work + Mindset
Allen Hutchison built a GitHub activity monitor with Gemini CLI in 20 minutes, skipping search entirely. He calls this trend Personal Software: bespoke tools built for one user.
95 Reasons for Having Your Own Website in 2026
A personal website needs no business case. Bell Kiosk lists 95 reasons to make one, from keeping a daily writing practice to bringing guest books and web rings back.
Zach Holman got into a difficult college after his dad pushed him to send an extra essay. Cold outreach also got him hired at GitHub and into soccer club ownership. Send the cold email.
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.
Resources & Market Signals
Edition #120
Design Systems Meet AI, Process Evolves
Edition #144
