Shipping, Craft, and AI's Two Paths

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

Vertical software is eating horizontal software.
Your next job title is Intent Architect.
Now the constraint is knowing when to stop.
And 7 more

Most Interesting

When Shipping Becomes Too Easy

Mozilla.ai on how AI-assisted coding shifts the hard part from writing code to knowing what’s worth building in the first place.

Design + Development

Cascade Icons for CSS

Cascade lets you build layered UIs from modular components, with live previews and direct export to code or Figma. Aimed at teams prototyping complex interfaces.

Modal vs. Separate Page: UX Decision Tree

Vitaly Friedman’s 4-step decision tree cuts through the modal-vs-page debate: when interruption serves the user, when it doesn’t, and where navigation belongs.

How I Built an AI Receptionist for a Luxury Mechanic Shop - Part 1

Kedasha Kerr built Axle, a voice AI receptionist for her brother’s mechanic shop, using MongoDB Atlas and Voyage AI for RAG, Vapi for telephony, Claude for responses, and FastAPI webhooks. Super cool stuff!

Tech + Innovation

There Are Only Two Paths Left for Software

a16z says that software is splitting in two: horizontal tools that race to the bottom on price, and vertical platforms that own enough of a workflow to make switching painful.

How Anthropic’s Claude Thinks

ByteByteGo breaks down Anthropic’s interpretability research on Claude. The findings might surprise you (they surprised me).

Tinker

Shopify just released Tinker, a free mobile app with 100+ AI tools for images, videos, logos, and product photography.

Work + Mindset

The Evolution of Craft

Carl Szabo argues manual UX and coding work is over. His Middle Loop framework puts designers in charge of supervising AI agents, and the Intent Architect role turns taste into machine-readable specs.

The Curse of the Cursor

The cursor is older than the mouse. Unsung makes the case that it’s overdue for rethinking.