Conviction Over Craft

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

Matthew Santone on the changing face of design
Plausible design is quietly replacing great design
A beautiful drawing tool
The new AI workflow
And 7 more

Most Interesting

Pablo Stanley’s UI course is now free

Pablo Stanley’s UI course is now free Pablo Stanley’s self-paced course helps you gain a solid foundation in UI design, including typography, color harmony, and layout, essential for creating visually appealing and functional interfaces.

Design + Development

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

AI lets designers ship ideas without waiting for permission, but that same autonomy exposes designers who only critique instead of decide. Andy Budd weighs both futures.

tldraw is his main design tool now

Mariusz says he now uses tldraw more than Figma. Rectangles and arrows are enough once your design system lives in code, because the AI agent just maps sketches to real components. He saw the idea first from Jem Gold at Airbnb.

Drawesome

Seven pens, one eraser, and two lines of code to drop a drawing toolbar into any React app.

The naked designer: What happens when you can’t hide behind craft

Craft used to answer the question of whether you knew what you were doing. Matthew Santone argues polish is now free, so it signals nothing, and conviction is all that’s left.

Tech + Innovation

Nick Baumann’s AI workflow: voice, Codex, and ChatGPT Sites

OpenAI’s Nick Baumann books flights, hotels, and expense reports in one voice conversation, no apps opened, using Codex and ChatGPT Work’s Heartbeats automation.

Tools encode trust, and AI keeps changing shape

The Stack Overflow blog traces why developers cling to Vim and their IDEs. Their survey found AI usage climbed from 76% to 84% while trust in it dropped from 40% to 29%.

Software’s Margins Are Getting Worse With Scale

Every AI feature costs real money per use, so software’s old free-distribution superpower is gone. Nicolo cites ICONIQ survey data putting average gross margins on AI products near 52% in 2026, up from 41% in 2024.

Work + Mindset

Whatnot’s CPO thinks PM shouldn’t have to exist

Whatnot’s product team was founded on the premise “we regret that product management exists.” CPO Tom Verrilli explains why, plus his hiring bar and “play the accordion” model.

Everyone’s work is starting to look the same

Marie Claire Dean digs into the research behind design convergence. A meta-analysis of 19 studies found a real homogenisation effect when people create with AI, but a small one. She points instead at Project CETI, decoding a sperm whale alphabet.

You Can Prompt a Prototype. You Can’t Prompt Taste.

Ecaterina Petroia ran a master’s experiment on 44 people rating 20 paintings, half AI-made. They guessed barely better than a coin flip. Then she relabeled 10 AI paintings as human work, and people rated the same images more complex and more novel.