Building Without Understanding

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

Short, but useful essays about design engineering
The robot that walked into 30 strange homes and got to work
Design system conventions in Figma
And 7 more

Most Interesting

Designing with AI

Buzz Usborne’s rules for designing AI-powered products, pulled from his own shipped work. Where the usual product design patterns hold up, where they fall apart, and what he does to keep things on track.

Design + Development

Perfectly centered type still looks wrong

Pangram Pangram on why math betrays your eye. Round letters need to overshoot the baseline, wordmarks need nudging to feel balanced, and hanging punctuation plus InDesign’s Optical Margin Alignment cleans up text blocks.

How Vercel’s sidebar card stack became its own navigation

Rauno Freiberg breaks down Vercel’s sidebar card stack. Arrow controls failed, so the stacked cards themselves became the navigation. Invisible hit areas do quiet work, and the motion tells you the dismiss button clears every card, not one. Craft A collection of design engineering concepts. Each essay is short, plain, and full of small ideas that make a UI look better.

Tech + Innovation

The robot that walked into 30 strange homes and got to work

Figure says Helix 2.5 is a humanoid-robot model that can tidy rooms, fold towels, and make beds in 30 unfamiliar homes without collecting new data or adapting to those homes.

Snap’s trying to get people to buy $2,195 smart glasses

Snap’s Specs launch at $2,195, sold through Verizon stores with a data partnership attached. Mark Gurman walks through the design calls, what the software actually does, and why that price is the whole bet on consumer AR.

Siri can be swapped out for Claude or ChatGPT

Code in iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate points to Siri running on third-party models, with Claude and ChatGPT handling system actions Apple’s own model won’t.

Work + Mindset

Shipping code you don’t understand

The old workplace assumption was that producing something meant understanding it. AI broke that, so reviewers now have to ask whether you actually grasp what you submitted. Terrible Software’s fix for engineers: read your own work, and say plainly what you’ve verified.

We are all product engineers now

Laurie Voss says agents are eating the software development lifecycle, so what’s left is product judgment, taste, and deciding what to build. He breaks down which development costs have already collapsed, plus a ten year forecast for the industry.

Design system conventions in Figma

Nathan Curtis on where Figma conventions actually live and what each one costs you. Icons, subcomponents, and images get the deep treatment, including the tradeoffs nobody documents.