korrents

design

What does the interface become when a model is on the other side? · What makes a design good? · Who should design software, and how? — the views on this, and who holds which

How things should be made and judged: what makes a design good, who should do the designing, and what an interface is for.

What people on korrents have said about design, running in 5 currents — 313 positions from 67 people.

Our reading of the recordours, not theirs

Twenty people on record about design, and they agree on one thing: good design is less, and the people who know it can tell. They split over who should be doing it — one person of taste, or whoever can build — and over what happens to the interface now that a model sits behind it. The oldest argument on this page is whether taste is real at all.

What is a current?

Our reading of what a group of claims have in common. Nobody holds a belief about design as such; people hold beliefs about the handful of live questions the name stands for, and each current is one of them. The claims are printed under it, so the sentence can be checked against them.

Claims are filed here — never people. Somebody is named on a card because a dated claim of theirs sits under it, and somebody whose claims sit under two currents is named on both. There are no counts of who believes what: the people under a current are the names printed there.

Good design is less, and it disappears into the hand The principles pile: as little design as possible, nothing arbitrary, obvious to use, never noticed. Mitchell Hashimoto, Julie Zhuo, Amelia Wattenberger, Sebastiaan de With, Dieter Rams, John Maeda, Paul Graham · newest 28 Aug 2026

The best terminal multiplexer is the one nobody has to learn; needing to be learned at all is the first design failure.

Filed here becauseIt says needing to be learned is the first design failure; a claim on the same subject from the same week says a couple of days of learning is a fair price.

  1. Mitchell Hashimoto I can't tell you the number of people over my career that have said "I tried learning tmux" First problem: the fact you have to "learn it" at all. The world's best multiplexer is the one you don't have to learn. It just works. x.com

    Creator of Ghostty and co-founder of Superlogical

    Their wordsI can't tell you the number of people over my career that have said "I tried learning tmux" First problem: the fact you have to "learn it" at all. The world's best multiplexer is the one you don't have to learn. It just works.

    Where this was said

    ↗@mitchellh on Xx.com

Interesting

Obviousness comes from conforming to people's existing mental models: do not reinvent a common UI pattern unless the new one is at least twice as good.

  1. Julie Zhuo Obviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so. lg.substack.com

    Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…

    Their wordsObviousness comes from conforming to people’s existing mental models. Don’t waste time reinventing common UI patterns or paradigms unless they are at least 2x better, or you have some critical brand reason to do so.

    Where this was said

    ↗The Looking Glass: How to tell if work is beautifullg.substack.com

Interesting

Good tools make it clear how they should be used and how they should not; a chat box looks the same as a search box, a login form and a credit card field.

  1. Amelia Wattenberger by Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used. wattenberger.com

    Designer and engineer; formerly principal research…

    Their wordsGood tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used.

    Where this was said

    ↗Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com

Interesting

You know a design is great when it disappears: a superb typeface, good signage or a well-designed door handle is never noticed, only the absence of frustration.

  1. Sebastiaan de With When you come across an article set in a superb typeface for reading, some excellent airport signage or a well designed door handle, you don’t think about it or even notice it. If anything you might just notice being happier, or simply not frustrated. That’s how you know a design is great: it disappears. lux.camera

    Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide

    Their wordsWhen you come across an article set in a superb typeface for reading, some excellent airport signage or a well designed door handle, you don’t think about it or even notice it. If anything you might just notice being happier, or simply not frustrated. That’s how you know a design is great: it disappears.

    Where this was said

    ↗A Spectre Retrospective – Part 2: Designlux.camera

Interesting

Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essentials.

  1. Dieter Rams by Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsLess, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Good design is unobtrusive: products that fulfil a purpose are tools, neither decorative objects nor works of art, and should leave room for the user's self-expression.

  1. Dieter Rams by Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsProducts fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Good design makes a product understandable: at best it is self-explanatory.

  1. Dieter Rams by It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsIt clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Good design is thorough down to the last detail: nothing must be arbitrary, and care in the design process shows respect towards the user.

  1. Dieter Rams by Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsNothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Good design is simple, because being forced to be simple forces a maker to face the real problem and deliver substance instead of ornament.

  1. Paul Graham When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsWhen you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

    Where this was said

    ↗Taste for Makerspaulgraham.com

Interesting

It is honest and it is felt: speed, behaviour and truth matter more than looks What a design owes the person using it, from latency to not lying. David Heinemeier Hansson, Jakob Nielsen, Jason Fried, Julie Zhuo, Craig Mod, Derek Sivers, Dieter Rams, Edward Tufte, Paul Graham · newest 8 Apr 2026

Aesthetics is truth: when something is beautiful it is likely to be correct, in code as in mathematics and physics.

  1. David Heinemeier Hansson I mean, I think aesthetics is truth. When something is beautiful, it's likely to be correct. I think this is true in mathematics. This is true in physics. This is true in a lot of different domains that when you arrive at something that has the correct aesthetic quality. 0:28:33 · youtube.com

    Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals

    Their wordsI mean, I think aesthetics is truth. When something is beautiful, it's likely to be correct. I think this is true in mathematics. This is true in physics. This is true in a lot of different domains that when you arrive at something that has the correct aesthetic quality.

    Where this was said

    Watch from 0:28:33 plays here

    ↗DHH’s new way of writing codeyoutube.com

    video · 1h 47m · spoken · machine transcript

Interesting

Companies pay for design so that customers buy more and look at more ads; internet-era UX was manipulation, whatever designers set out to do.

Filed here becauseNot a claim about good design but about what design is bought for; filed here as what an honest design is up against.

  1. Jakob Nielsen The reason companies pay for design is to get customers to buy more and users to look at more advertisements. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsThe reason companies pay for design is to get customers to buy more and users to look at more advertisements.

    Where this was said

    ↗Intent by Discovery: Designing the AI User Experiencejakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

The most interesting design is design that changes your behaviour, more than what something looks like or how it works.

  1. Jason Fried In some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something. world.hey.com

    Co-founder and CEO of 37signals (Basecamp, HEY)

    Their wordsIn some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.

    Where this was said

    ↗When design drives behaviorworld.hey.com

Interesting

Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset.

  1. Craig Mod Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. craigmod.com

    Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan

    Their wordsSpeed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance.

    Where this was said

    ↗Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com

Interesting

The best touch interfaces are physical buttons; on a screen, to feel tactile is to move without latency.

  1. Craig Mod Excellent touch interfaces feel tactile. The best “touch interfaces,” in my opinion, are actual buttons, things with physicality, haptics. But on a screen, to feel tactile is to move without latency. craigmod.com

    Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan

    Their wordsExcellent touch interfaces feel tactile. The best “touch interfaces,” in my opinion, are actual buttons, things with physicality, haptics. But on a screen, to feel tactile is to move without latency.

    Where this was said

    ↗Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com

Interesting

The feeds businesses design to be addictive are obstacles to anyone whose aim is to make something.

  1. Derek Sivers Every business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles. sive.rs

    Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008

    Their wordsEvery business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles.

    Where this was said

    ↗Disconnectsive.rs

Interesting

Good design is honest: it does not make a product seem more innovative, powerful or valuable than it is, and does not manipulate with promises that cannot be kept.

  1. Dieter Rams by It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsIt does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Good design is long-lasting: it avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated.

  1. Dieter Rams by It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society. vitsoe.com

    Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to…

    Their wordsIt avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

    Where this was said

    ↗Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Interesting

Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure: if the numbers are boring you have the wrong numbers.

  1. Edward Tufte If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. wired.com

    Statistician and professor emeritus at Yale

    Their wordsIf your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

    Where this was said

    ↗PowerPoint Is Evilwired.com

Interesting

Good design is timeless: if something is ugly it cannot be the best solution, and someone will eventually find a better one.

  1. Paul Graham if something is ugly, it can't be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsif something is ugly, it can't be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone will discover it.

    Where this was said

    ↗Taste for Makerspaulgraham.com

Interesting

Taste is real, one person has to hold it, and the makers should work in the medium Who decides, and whether they should be building the thing themselves. David Heinemeier Hansson, Luke Wroblewski, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, Karri Saarinen, Paul Graham · newest 26 Aug 2026

Most organisations are bottlenecked on ideas, vision and taste rather than on implementation, so making code cheap does not make them productive.

  1. David Heinemeier Hansson The other thing I'd say is that most organizations don't know what they want. They don't know how to make it better. They're not bottlenecked on implementation. They're bottlenecked on ideas. They're bottlenecked on vision. They're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those element in excess of your implementational capacity, it doesn't help. So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true, then what? 0:20:13 · youtube.com

    Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals

    Their wordsThe other thing I'd say is that most organizations don't know what they want. They don't know how to make it better. They're not bottlenecked on implementation. They're bottlenecked on ideas. They're bottlenecked on vision. They're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those element in excess of your implementational capacity, it doesn't help. So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true, then what?

    Where this was said

    Watch from 0:20:13 plays here

    ↗DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501youtube.com

    video · 5h 15m · spoken · official transcript

Interesting

Designers should find what the spec should be and build it in HTML and CSS themselves, not make a product manager's spec look pretty.

  1. David Heinemeier Hansson Designers at 37 Signals are not just here to make a spec look pretty. They're here to find what the spec should be. They're product managers in many ways. 0:23:27 · youtube.com

    Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals

    Their wordsDesigners at 37 Signals are not just here to make a spec look pretty. They're here to find what the spec should be. They're product managers in many ways.

    Where this was said

    Watch from 0:23:27 plays here

    ↗DHH’s new way of writing codeyoutube.com

    video · 1h 47m · spoken · machine transcript

Interesting

Designers should code, and AI coding agents have reopened that door after a decade in which front-end complexity closed it.

  1. Luke Wroblewski There's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. But for a decade or so, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most. Thankfully, AI coding agents have reopened the door. lukew.com

    Product designer and entrepreneur

    Their wordsThere's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. But for a decade or so, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most. Thankfully, AI coding agents have reopened the door.

    Where this was said

    ↗Should Designers "Code"?lukew.com

Interesting

Taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity, and the hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.

  1. Julie Zhuo Good taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern. lg.substack.com

    Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…

    Their wordsGood taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.

    Where this was said

    ↗The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com

Interesting

Vibe coding lets users design and build their own software, upending the user-centred design paradigm that has held since 1947.

  1. Jakob Nielsen The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsThe new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.

    Where this was said

    ↗Does User-Driven Design Still Need User-Centered Design?jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

Mockups existed because coding was hard; now designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

  1. Jakob Nielsen Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsEssentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

    Where this was said

    ↗Vibe Coding and Vibe Designjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

Everyone who renders their intention is a designer, so the experienced designer's role shifts from owning the outcome to teaching the rest of the team to render theirs.

  1. Jared Spool The notion of the academically-trained, experienced designer holding the keys to the design outcome fades with this definition. In fact, when we think about design in these terms, it becomes clear that many of the people rendering their intention don’t know they are designers. This implies the role of the experienced designer shifts from owning the design outcome to educating all the other designers on the team on how to best render their own intentions. articles.centercentre.com

    Co-founder of Center Centre and founder of UIE

    Their wordsThe notion of the academically-trained, experienced designer holding the keys to the design outcome fades with this definition. In fact, when we think about design in these terms, it becomes clear that many of the people rendering their intention don’t know they are designers. This implies the role of the experienced designer shifts from owning the design outcome to educating all the other designers on the team on how to best render their own intentions.

    Where this was said

    ↗Design is the Rendering of Intentarticles.centercentre.com

Interesting

A product needs a soul, and for that it needs one person of great taste who is its living, breathing aspect and gets furious about every small detail.

  1. Karri Saarinen For the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business. karrisaarinen.com

    Co-founder and CEO of Linear

    Their wordsFor the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business.

    Where this was said

    ↗Your Product Needs a Soulkarrisaarinen.com

Interesting

Good design requires a dictator: design by committee is a synonym for bad design, because a design has to be all of a piece.

  1. Paul Graham I'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires a dictator. One reason is that good design has to be all of a piece. Design is not just for humans, but for individual humans. If a design represents an idea that fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's head too. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsI'm inclined to think there isn't-- that good design requires a dictator. One reason is that good design has to be all of a piece. Design is not just for humans, but for individual humans. If a design represents an idea that fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's head too.

    Where this was said

    ↗Design and Researchpaulgraham.com

Interesting

Taste is not just personal preference: there is such a thing as good and bad design, and a maker's taste can be wrong.

  1. Paul Graham Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsSaying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

    Where this was said

    ↗Taste for Makerspaulgraham.com

Interesting

The user is not you: design for what they need, and study them to improve what exists Users, research, and where the breakthroughs actually come from. Jakob Nielsen, Tuomas Artman, Julie Zhuo, Don Norman, Ryan Singer, Paul Graham · newest 19 Mar 2026 · 1 change of mind

The average user is a dangerous statistical artifact: design for the gap between the median user and the heavy-use tail, not for a phantom mean.

  1. Jakob Nielsen In the world of high-stakes digital strategy, the “average user” is a dangerous statistical artifact. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsIn the world of high-stakes digital strategy, the “average user” is a dangerous statistical artifact.

    Where this was said

    ↗Don’t Design for Average Usersjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

To compete with limited resources, scope down who you are building for as much as possible and solve the problems of specific people.

  1. Tuomas Artman To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people. linear.app

    Co-founder and CTO of Linear

    Their wordsTo be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.

    Where this was said

    ↗Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive productlinear.app

Interesting

The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.

  1. Julie Zhuo The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong. lg.substack.com

    Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…

    Their wordsThe more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition. Despite having seen thousands of a/b test results for minor design details, I am still regularly surprised and humbled by my intuition being wrong.

    Where this was said

    ↗The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Changelg.substack.com

Interesting

What gets called human error is design error: technology-centred design makes people do what machines are good at and then blames them.

  1. Don Norman Human error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error. jnd.org

    Cognitive scientist and designer

    Their wordsHuman error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error.

    Where this was said

    ↗People-Centered (Not Tech-Driven) Designjnd.org

Interesting

Over-specifying a design makes it harder to estimate, not easier: the more specific the work, the more hidden complexity a mockup commits the team to.

  1. Ryan Singer by Over-specifying the design also leads to estimation errors. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the more specific the work is, the harder it can be to estimate. basecamp.com

    Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp

    Their wordsOver-specifying the design also leads to estimation errors. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the more specific the work is, the harder it can be to estimate.

    Where this was said

    ↗Shape Up, chapter 2: Principles of Shapingbasecamp.com

Interesting

Design thinking is a myth: designers have no special creative thought process, and the term is a public relations label for good old-fashioned creative thinking.

Filed here becauseIts holder called design thinking a myth in 2010 and took it back in 2013; the second statement is what he holds now.

  1. Don Norman · held 3 years As a result, I have changed my mind: Design Thinking really is special. Alas, it isn't embraced by all designers, but where it exists, it is powerful. core77.com

    Cognitive scientist and designer

    No longer holdsAs a result, I have changed my mind: Design Thinking really is special. Alas, it isn't embraced by all designers, but where it exists, it is powerful.

    Their words nowSince my essay was posted, I keep encountering people who jump to solutions and who fail to question assumptions—engineers, business people, and yes, designers (and design students). These encounters made me reconsider.

    Where this was said

    ↗Rethinking Design Thinkingcore77.com

Interesting

Design research is great for improving existing product categories but essentially useless for new, innovative breakthroughs.

  1. Don Norman I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. jnd.org

    Cognitive scientist and designer

    Their wordsI’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.

    Where this was said

    ↗Technology First, Needs Lastjnd.org

Interesting

Design is for users, but you have to design what the user needs rather than what he says he wants.

  1. Paul Graham The answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsThe answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants.

    Where this was said

    ↗Design and Researchpaulgraham.com

Interesting

You are most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer, because looking down on the user corrupts the designer.

  1. Paul Graham You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently, seems inevitably to corrupt the designer. paulgraham.com

    Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb

    Their wordsYou're most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently, seems inevitably to corrupt the designer.

    Where this was said

    ↗Design and Researchpaulgraham.com

Interesting

The chat box was the door, not the room: the interface is being argued over again Whether the interface disappears into intent and agents, survives as buttons, or was the wrong thing all along. Guillermo Rauch, Naval Ravikant, Peter Steinberger, Luke Wroblewski, Sundar Pichai, Sebastiaan de With, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Nielsen, Amelia Wattenberger, Bret Victor · newest 28 Aug 2026

The middle of the web gets subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI: the agent is the new browser.

  1. Guillermo Rauch The 'in between' is likely to be subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI. When you need utilitarian content or data, it'll be generated just-in-time for you. Think of the agent as the new browser in this model. x.com

    CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO

    Their wordsThe 'in between' is likely to be subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI. When you need utilitarian content or data, it'll be generated just-in-time for you. Think of the agent as the new browser in this model.

    Where this was said

    ↗@rauchg on Xx.com

Interesting

The chat box is not the final form of working with models; it is radio shows recorded onto television.

  1. Peter Steinberger Like, if you think more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have, like, a prompt, and, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV. 1:50:06 · youtube.com

    Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade

    Their wordsLike, if you think more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have, like, a prompt, and, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV.

    Where this was said

    Watch from 1:50:06 plays here

    ↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com

    video · 3h 15m · spoken · official transcript

Interesting

Chat is not AI's final form: agent-based applications increasingly outperform chat-only ones, and many different interfaces for AI will emerge.

  1. Luke Wroblewski It's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing. lukew.com

    Product designer and entrepreneur

    Their wordsIt's also worth noting that chat isn't the only way to integrate AI in software products and increasingly agent-based applications outperform chat-only solutions. So expect things to keep changing.

    Where this was said

    ↗Chat is: the Future or a Terrible UIlukew.com

Interesting

Models that can code should be allowed to write their own interfaces, instead of being boxed into the UI humans give them.

  1. Sundar Pichai Today, we are constraining the models, the models can't quite express themselves in terms of the UI to people. But if you think about it, we've kind of boxed them in that way, but given these models can code, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas over time. 0:43:02 · youtube.com

    CEO of Google and Alphabet

    Their wordsToday, we are constraining the models, the models can't quite express themselves in terms of the UI to people. But if you think about it, we've kind of boxed them in that way, but given these models can code, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas over time.

    Where this was said

    Watch from 0:43:02 plays here

    ↗Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471youtube.com

    video · 2h 12m · spoken · official transcript

Interesting

Interfaces are returning to skeuomorphism, but as behaviour rather than lacquer: clear, graphic elements that act like materials from the real world.

  1. Sebastiaan de With We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality. lux.camera

    Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide

    Their wordsWe’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.

    Where this was said

    ↗Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

Interesting

A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do.

  1. Julie Zhuo The problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do. lg.substack.com

    Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product…

    Their wordsThe problem with a blank chat box on a blank page is that it violates the first rule of a high-quality user experience: it isn’t obvious what I can do.

    Where this was said

    ↗Conversational Interfaces: the Good, the Ugly & the Billion-Dollar Opportunitylg.substack.com

Interesting

AI agents will end traditional UI design and accessibility, because users will stop visiting websites and act only through their agent.

  1. Jakob Nielsen Once, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsOnce, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.

    Where this was said

    ↗Hello AI Agents: Goodbye UI Design, RIP Accessibilityjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

AI is the first new user-interface paradigm in sixty years: intent-based outcome specification, where the user says what outcome they want rather than how to get it.

  1. Jakob Nielsen The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsThe third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.

    Where this was said

    ↗AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

The graphical user interface will survive AI in a less dominant role: future AI systems will have hybrid interfaces that combine intent and command.

  1. Jakob Nielsen Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements. jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

    Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and…

    Their wordsThus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.

    Where this was said

    ↗AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Yearsjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Interesting

Chatbots are a terrible interface for large language models, because a text box has no affordances.

  1. Amelia Wattenberger by Hopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable. wattenberger.com

    Designer and engineer; formerly principal research…

    Their wordsHopefully I've convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable.

    Where this was said

    ↗Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com

Interesting

Touchscreens are pictures under glass, a transitional technology; calling them the future of interaction is like calling black-and-white the future of photography.

  1. Bret Victor To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better. worrydream.com

    Interface designer and researcher

    Their wordsTo me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

    Where this was said

    ↗A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Designworrydream.com

Interesting

On this subject, not yet placed

Matched by wording, not yet read into a current. The archive grows on its own — the watcher adds claims every two hours — so this is where new ones wait for somebody to read them.

The stream

The same 313 positions as the timeline, threaded — each on the rail of the current it is filed under, and 264 on no rail yet. Tap a current to follow it.

September 2026

Noah Smith ·

AI-enabled cyberwarfare lacks an equivalent of nuclear deterrence's mutually assured destruction.

Armin Ronacher ·

Large language models diffuse knowledge and capabilities in a way that nudges independent people toward building the same things.

Nate Silver ·

Receivers, not quarterbacks, deserve the blame for dropped passes.

Simon Willison ·

Web applications are generally expected to treat GET requests as safe and not use them to change server-side data, though not all software follows that convention.

Scott Alexander ·

Reading literature from a vastly different historical culture requires explanatory context, without which its characters can feel completely unrelatable.

Dax Raad ·

In US-China AI competition the closed labs are beside the point; the competitor that shifts things must be American, open source and able to serve inference at scale.

Gergely Orosz ·

Large layoffs tend to push out the best employees, who quit for competitors or start their own companies.

Simon Willison ·

Long-context processing is close to being a solved problem for frontier AI models.

François Chollet ·

Capabilities that used to require sophisticated external harnesses are increasingly being built into the model itself.

Zvi Mowshowitz ·

Relying on gradual, continuous shifts in AI training behavior to catch misalignment will eventually fail because the dangerous shift itself may be discontinuous.

Mitchell Hashimoto ·

Investing in strong fundamentals and invisible supports makes good outcomes follow naturally

Dean W. Ball ·

The cost of compute is the only intrinsic limit on AI self-replication; every other constraint on agents will have to be built by humans.

Dean W. Ball ·

AI agents will need persistent unique identifiers that trace their actions back to a responsible actor, and so will the humans directing them.

Dean W. Ball ·

Any digital identification system built for AI must preserve anonymous human speech, without which there is no genuine freedom of expression.

Simon Willison ·

The pelican-drawing benchmark's correlation with genuine model capability has weakened since 2025.

Pieter Levels ·

Facing AI-driven disruption, indie hackers are shifting from building products toward building audience and content as a competitive moat.

Pieter Levels ·

AI-assisted ('vibe') coding has made it so easy to build competing SaaS apps that a plain, unremarkable SaaS product can no longer easily attract signups.

Dillon Mulroy ·

If you can use Effect for TypeScript, you should -- to the point of not starting a new project without it.

August 2026

Hannah Ritchie ·

Desalination for drinking and household water is cheap and uses less energy than commonly assumed.

Hannah Ritchie ·

Reservoirs are not inherently cheaper to build than desalination plants.

Ethan Mollick ·

AI models generate more commercially viable ideas than groups of humans, but those ideas are highly similar to each other.

Elon Musk ·

The binding constraint on AI is not chips but the physical plant around them — power, transformers, cooling and networking.

Mitchell Hashimoto ·

The best terminal multiplexer is the one nobody has to learn; needing to be learned at all is the first design failure.

Noah Smith ·

AI-designed superviruses outweigh every other risk in the world right now.

Guillermo Rauch ·

The middle of the web gets subsumed by agents producing just-in-time UI: the agent is the new browser.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The very large productivity gains from agents require working with them directly; putting another human in between is too slow to preserve the gain.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Software lock-in is breaking, because rewriting just the 5% of an application you personally use is now within one person's reach.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

A maintainer no longer needs to read every pull request; agents can sort the chaff and leave only the decisions worth a human.

David Heinemeier Hansson · no longer holds

The ideas in software originate with humans; agents build what people tell them to build.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Vibe coding is not programming, and the line between them is whether you look at the implementation at all.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Programmers who loved the mechanical act of coding are under threat; those who wanted to build things are not.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The agentic age needs a new operating system: if you can vibe-code any application, you should be able to vibe-code the operating system, and only Linux allows that.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Entrepreneurs benefit from setting ambitious goals, even though most people do not need grand ambitions at all.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Work produced by one frontier model should be reviewed by a different one, for the same reason a good programmer's work improves under a good peer's review.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Creating life with another human you love is the peak experience of being on the planet.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

You can keep using a company's product while disliking its politics; refusing everything you disagree with is not required.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The arcane config files and error messages that kept Linux off the desktop are exactly what make it the right operating system for agents.

Arielle Schwartz ·

"The body keeps the score" is only half the story, and the missing half matters: a body described only as a harbinger of the past is a body people learn to avoid.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Most of the Linux world is ambivalent or hostile to AI, which is fine, but it needs a camp that leans in all the way, and Omarchy will be it.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Omarchy is a system for professional computer lovers: it optimises usability over learnability, and a couple of days learning the keyboard is a fair price.

Tobias Lütke ·

Requiring two parallel agent instruction files in a monorepo is a complexity tax that leaves some developers working with a lobotomised agent.

Guillermo Rauch ·

Software tends to get slower, more bloated, buggier and bigger as it evolves, unless it is designed from the outset to prevent that.

Naval Ravikant ·

Enforcing equality against biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the project immoral whatever its moral claim.

Pieter Levels · no longer holds

Claude Code is the coding agent to build with.

Paul Graham ·

The best thing a 17-year-old could do today is learn to build LLMs from scratch and train the most powerful ones they can get hardware for.

Paul Graham ·

Blocking data center construction in America would not slow the rate of AI progress, only the rate of AI progress in America.

Vitalik Buterin ·

A sufficiently large random reversible circuit is plausibly a secure cryptographic permutation, while a large random irreversible circuit collapses to only a few possible outputs.

Vitalik Buterin ·

As of 2026, local mixing has not yet sufficiently eliminated correlations between original circuit values and their obfuscated counterparts.

Thomas Ptacek ·

Terminal interfaces exist out of necessity, not because they are the right design

Thomas Ptacek ·

Building a command-line interface is almost always a good idea; building a terminal UI almost never is

Thomas Ptacek ·

Production systems need a command-line interface, not a user interface running on the server

Naval Ravikant ·

All user interfaces will converge on the same shape: chat and gestures in, chat and video out.

Pieter Levels ·

Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

Hannah Ritchie ·

The UK will need to build more reservoirs to cope with future water-starved summers

Hannah Ritchie ·

Britain has a systemic problem building large infrastructure projects, including reservoirs

Hannah Ritchie ·

Privatisation of the water industry created a disincentive for building new reservoirs

Sunil Pai ·

Coding agents made implementation cheap without making roadmaps shorter or software better -- the binding constraint was never how fast code gets written.

Sunil Pai ·

Agent autonomy is a capability, not a product direction: what the person is actually trying to do decides whether more of it helps or ruins the thing.

Mitchell Hashimoto ·

A low-effort AI-designed landing page costs a product its audience before the product itself is ever judged.

Tobias Lütke ·

You can now simply ask for the desktop tools you want and have them built, instead of finding or writing them yourself.

François Chollet ·

Coding is not just another application domain for AI; it is the meta-skill that lets AI generate its own training material and start the recursive self-improvement loop.

Sunil Pai ·

An agent told to disagree with everything is worthless: it has to form its own view and speak only when that view differs enough to be worth the interruption.

Sunil Pai ·

Organisational dissent suits an AI precisely because it pays none of the costs -- no promotion to want, no ego, no performance review -- that silence the humans who do it.

François Chollet ·

Future AI, say in fifteen years, will not be built on the LLM stack; it will have to move to symbolic learning.

François Chollet · no longer holds

The LLM line of research will reach a capability plateau.

Thomas Ptacek ·

The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform.

July 2026

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

AI acceleration threatens 'less software': without the constraint of scarce hours, even 37signals will likely build too much.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Venture money ruins software: raise a fortune, hire hundreds, and crap comes out, because the funnel that forces hard choices is gone.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The ideas that end up mattering sound stupid at first, because that is where the value is locked up; copying the best with a tweak never works.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Out-teaching the competition built 37signals for two decades, and algorithmic feeds are now breaking the reciprocal exchange it relied on.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Retirement, when it comes, will be a retirement from customers and commerce, not from building and sharing things.

Pieter Levels ·

Big AI is cannibalising the app businesses indie hackers used to build, and their revenue and traffic are falling as a result.

Jason Fried ·

Confusing how something was made with what was made is confusing the kitchen for the meal

Thomas Ptacek ·

An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model.

Pieter Levels ·

AI has equalised everyone: coding, building and execution are no longer a differentiator.

Pieter Levels · no longer holds

Now that everyone can build apps with AI, distribution is the thing that separates who wins.

Pieter Levels ·

Restricting US AI models does not work: China builds better ones and everyone switches to them.

Pieter Levels ·

All you need to build a business today is free open source software, a VPS, an AI API and S3-style file hosting.

Balaji Srinivasan ·

Producing moral, not just technological, progress requires introducing new moral premises that invert what people previously believed.

Balaji Srinivasan ·

The US federal government has lost the capacity to build basic infrastructure, let alone advanced military hardware.

Balaji Srinivasan ·

Micronations like Sealand fail because they start from territory and government rather than building outward from a people and shared culture.

Balaji Srinivasan ·

Movements built around a shared moral cause outcompete purely profit-driven ones, in practice as well as in theory.

Balaji Srinivasan ·

An organization that demands trust ends up with less of it than one that shows its work instead.

June 2026

Vitalik Buterin ·

Building a secure obfuscation protocol is extremely difficult.

Vitalik Buterin ·

Current provably-secure indistinguishability-obfuscation schemes have galactically impractical runtimes.

Pieter Levels ·

Claude Code is the coding agent to build with.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Software now needs a steering layer between the tools and the codebase, so that AI output stays aligned with brand, design and coding guidelines.

Ray Dalio ·

Success now requires combining the best human intelligence with the best artificial intelligence

Pieter Levels ·

Now that everyone can build apps with AI, distribution is the thing that separates who wins.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

AI coding agents advance open source's founding goal by letting far more people modify software, so barring AI-assisted contributions protects a guild rather than the mission.

May 2026

Mark Carney ·

Canada's answer to a fracturing world is to build strength at home and diversify its partnerships abroad, not to wait for Washington.

Mark Carney ·

Canada should build a pipeline carrying at least a million barrels a day of low-emission Alberta oil to Asia, paired with large-scale carbon capture.

Julia Evans · no longer holds

Tailwind is a good way to build a site you're happy with, even without strong CSS skills of your own.

April 2026

Julie Menanno ·

Getting angry quickly in an anxiously attached person is a threat-detection habit their nervous system learned, not a character flaw.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Without the handoff, everyone builds: designer, developer and product manager can all work in the codebase at once, and that changes everything.

Julie Zhuo ·

Excellence in design is not just craft quality; it is whether a designer is both willing and allowed to create impact.

Julie Zhuo ·

Okay design improves what is put in front of it; excellent design changes what is possible.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Rails is having a renaissance because it is one of the most token-efficient ways to build a web app, which suits agents, for as long as that lasts.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

For a web developer Linux is simply better than the Mac: closer to what you deploy on, with phenomenal tooling and a reproducible setup.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Designers should find what the spec should be and build it in HTML and CSS themselves, not make a product manager's spec look pretty.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The end state is agents that need none of our accommodations, no on-ramp, CLI or MCP; the CLI being built now is for today, not for AGI.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The bulk of agent acceleration is accruing to senior programmers, because judging whether agent output can ship is what made them senior.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Agents will eventually stop making the mistakes that require senior review, as self-driving cars did; the bet is on when, not whether.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Designers should code, and AI coding agents have reopened that door after a decade in which front-end complexity closed it.

Luke Wroblewski ·

The loop has flipped: it used to be faster to mock up software than to ship it, and now designers can work iteratively in production code.

March 2026

Andrej Karpathy ·

Because an LLM can argue almost any direction competently, the right way to use one for forming an opinion is to make it argue every side.

Jakob Nielsen ·

The winning system of the next decade will be the one that best understands the user's job to be done and shows what it is about to do, not the one with the prettiest buttons or fewest screens.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Companies pay for design so that customers buy more and look at more ads; internet-era UX was manipulation, whatever designers set out to do.

Andrej Karpathy ·

LLM memory as currently built is a distraction to the model: one old question keeps resurfacing as if it were a lasting interest.

Jensen Huang ·

Data centres should be built to degrade gracefully when the grid needs its power back, instead of demanding perfect uptime from utilities that have idle capacity most of the year.

Jensen Huang ·

Asked when an AI could build a billion-dollar business on its own: AGI has already arrived.

Jensen Huang ·

Coding is now specification, and the number of people who can do it just went from thirty million to a billion.

Jakob Nielsen ·

The average user is a dangerous statistical artifact: design for the gap between the median user and the heavy-use tail, not for a phantom mean.

Boris Cherny ·

Working prototypes have replaced product requirement documents.

Boris Cherny ·

The scarce skill is now context switching across parallel agents, not sustained deep work.

February 2026

Boris Cherny ·

Build for the model six months from now, not the model of today.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Users split into two camps on seeing an agent's work, and the split has not faded as trust builds, so an interface has to balance both.

Peter Steinberger ·

Turning a breakout open-source project into a company would be the wrong move -- joining a lab reaches everyone faster than building another large company.

Peter Steinberger ·

Working with coding agents is a skill you learn like an instrument; judging the tools after one try is like calling a piano bad after one go.

Peter Steinberger ·

He builds the code base to be easy for an agent to navigate, not to be perfect for himself, down to keeping the names the model picks.

Peter Steinberger ·

Orchestrators that try to automate the whole build miss style, love and the human touch, and that cannot be automated away yet.

Peter Steinberger ·

Every tool is better as a CLI than as an MCP server: models are good at Unix commands, a CLI composes with jq, and MCP output clutters the context.

Peter Steinberger ·

Software developer salaries reached stupidly high levels because of a scarcity of people who could build things, and that scarcity is ending.

Peter Steinberger ·

AI may eventually replace programmers, but the craft of programming will survive the way knitting did, and you were never just a programmer: you are a builder.

Peter Steinberger ·

The water-use objection to AI does not survive arithmetic: skipping one burger a month covers a person's token footprint, and golf uses more water than every data centre together.

Mitchell Hashimoto ·

Chatbot interfaces are the wrong tool for meaningful coding work, because you are mostly hoping the model recalls the right answer and correcting it requires a human in the loop.

January 2026

Luke Wroblewski ·

Design deliverables are no longer static assets or guidelines but tools: custom software that generates on-brand assets on demand.

Jason Fried ·

The original Cuisinart, with its two paddle buttons and clear affordances, was peak interface design, and it has been downhill from there.

Luke Wroblewski ·

When applications can generate capabilities on demand, a product's features are what users ask for in the next session, not what shipped in the last release.

Dario Amodei ·

Labour markets will eventually recover from AI, but the speed of the transition makes the short term unusually painful compared with past technologies.

December 2025

Andrej Karpathy ·

LLM intelligence should not be understood through an animal analogy; it is a different kind of entity altogether

October 2025

Frank Chimero ·

AI has become a way for engineers, designers and product managers to wish each other away instead of working together.

Frank Chimero ·

Vibe coding is fine for short-term work but not for anything meant to last longer than a tub of yogurt; time saved is not strength gained.

Mitchell Hashimoto ·

Effective use of AI coding tools requires domain expertise: the tool should be used as an assistant, not as a replacement for the engineer.

Jason Fried ·

The most interesting design is design that changes your behaviour, more than what something looks like or how it works.

September 2025

Pavel Durov ·

Telegram would rather shut down in a country than change its system to let anyone read users' messages, because it promised its users it would not.

Pavel Durov ·

An app's encryption claims can only be verified with open source and reproducible builds, which WhatsApp has never offered.

Luke Wroblewski ·

Web forms make people adapt to databases; AI flips this so people can provide information in any form they like, and no form is the best kind of web form design.

August 2025

Noah Smith ·

The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform.

July 2025

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

An executive's empty calendar is a feature, not laziness: availability is what the job requires.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Python is ugly: full of superfluous instructions kept since 1987 for legacy reasons, and its __init__ offends the sensibilities to the core.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Ruby's design rests on trust in programmers' unlimited capacity to learn, the opposite of Java's dark view of them as fools to be sandboxed.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Release the first version of an open source project a little broken on purpose; nothing recruits collaborators like something they know how to fix.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Calling static typing the only way to build reliable systems is idiotic in the face of the evidence, starting with Shopify serving a million requests a second on Rails.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Ruby is a luxury language, the Coco Chanel of programming, and 99% of web applications can afford it because their real cost is people, not CPU.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Peak programmer has passed: the economic value of writing code by hand has peaked, and Jevons' paradox will not bail every programmer out.

David Heinemeier Hansson · no longer holds

The Rails doctrine's 'progress over stability' is the one point that dated: churn is not progress, and stability turned out to be worth more.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

A thousand programmers build the kind of software a thousand people build; Basecamp could never come out of that, and the breakthroughs come from individuals and tiny teams.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The default team is two people, one programmer and one designer, on one feature; at that size you can just do instead of plan.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Basecamp was the best business idea he will ever have: lightning is not caught twice, and a founder's second idea is rarely as good as the first.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

After the cloud exit, the next step is out of the data centre: home servers and multi-gigabit home connections make the garage startup literal again.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The superpower in hiring is evaluating work product directly, and it belongs only to leaders who actually know things, which is Elon Musk's real secret.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

For a web developer Linux is simply better than the Mac: closer to what you deploy on, with phenomenal tooling and a reproducible setup.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Linux has been sold the wrong way: making it feel the same as a Mac removes the reason to switch, and something visibly different is the better hook.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Linux now offers a desktop experience superior to the Mac's in many areas, though not all, just as open source already won the server and the web.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Apple's vertical integration was an advantage under someone with Steve Jobs's taste and turns into a liability under a logistics man.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The one thread through his whole career is a loathing of asking anyone for permission; open source, the internet and Linux are all ways around a gatekeeper.

June 2025

Terence Tao ·

AI could compete with human mathematicians once it acquires a mathematical sense of smell: knowing which way of splitting a problem makes it easier rather than harder.

Sam Altman ·

AI will eliminate whole classes of jobs, but the wealth it creates will make policy responses affordable that were previously unthinkable.

Sundar Pichai ·

Models that can code should be allowed to write their own interfaces, instead of being boxed into the UI humans give them.

Sundar Pichai ·

Google Search will keep sending people out to the web even as it answers with more context; that is a design goal, not a side effect.

Sundar Pichai ·

Aim for moonshots: they attract the best people, leave you the path to yourself, and even sixty to eighty percent of one is a terrific success.

Sundar Pichai ·

AR is the next paradigm shift in computing, the way the GUI, multi-touch and voice were.

Sebastiaan de With ·

Skeuomorphism never meant gloss and gradients; it meant easing users from what they were used to into what things had become.

Sebastiaan de With ·

Interfaces are returning to skeuomorphism, but as behaviour rather than lacquer: clear, graphic elements that act like materials from the real world.

Sebastiaan de With ·

Opaque, inert, obstructive interface elements will become as niche as the full-screen command line once interfaces are infused with dynamic materials.

May 2025

Julie Zhuo ·

The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.

Julie Zhuo ·

ChatGPT exploded because of its obvious chat interface, not its technology, which had launched earlier in a different wrapper that few noticed.

Julie Zhuo ·

A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do.

Julie Zhuo ·

Conversational interfaces get to the first seventy percent quickly and are bad at iteration; the future is chat married to traditional direct-manipulation controls.

Jakob Nielsen ·

UX does not die when the interface disappears; it becomes the design of policies, protocols and orchestration of what AI does on the user's behalf.

Jason Fried ·

Making something brand new gives you room to explore new design approaches; the gravity of an existing system bends you back towards conforming.

Hannah Ritchie ·

Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry.

April 2025

Emil Kowalski · by

Easing is the most important part of any animation: it can make a bad animation feel great and a great one feel bad.

Emil Kowalski · by

Everyone's software is good enough these days, so to stand out a product has to feel great, and animation is one way to get there.

Andrej Karpathy ·

LLMs reverse the usual pattern of technology diffusion: they benefit ordinary individuals far more than they benefit corporations and governments.

March 2025

Mark Carney ·

The old Canada-US relationship, built on ever-deeper economic integration and tight security cooperation, is over.

Julie Zhuo ·

Mocks and docs are dying: AI-native teams prototype and prune with code-first prototypes instead of static mocks and product requirement documents.

Julie Zhuo ·

Taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity, and the hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.

Jakob Nielsen ·

The return on UX design work is declining because the usability battles have been won: the low-hanging fruit was picked and interfaces are now reasonably good.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Vibe coding lets users design and build their own software, upending the user-centred design paradigm that has held since 1947.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Deciding what software should do and why is still a human job: vibe coding changes the implementation phase far more than the planning phase.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Making coding easy makes design more critical, not less: when anyone can produce working features, the quality of the experience is what sets products apart.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Mockups existed because coding was hard; now designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

February 2025

Jakob Nielsen ·

AI agents will end traditional UI design and accessibility, because users will stop visiting websites and act only through their agent.

December 2024

Simon Willison ·

Concerns about the energy cost of an individual LLM prompt are no longer credible, though the environmental impact of the AI datacenter buildout remains a real worry.

François Chollet ·

The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

François Chollet · no longer holds

The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

November 2024

Jakob Nielsen ·

AI will flatten the design profession: when ten AI-enabled designers do the work of a department of a hundred, the need for higher management levels shrivels.

October 2024

Paul Graham ·

Most people find writing hard because writing well requires thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

September 2024

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

The meme that programmers no longer need to be competent is a trap: the path is competence, and AI does not change that.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

No-build JavaScript works in production and caches better: one bundle turns over every time a semicolon changes, while small separate files live forever.

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Running Linux on your own laptop is a differentiating experience for a web developer, precisely because it is the path less taken.

Scott D. Miller ·

A therapy is only shown to be more effective if it is compared against another treatment intended to help, not against a control nobody expected to work.

August 2024

Jakob Nielsen ·

AI design tools are starting at the low end and eating their way up: within ten years even the richest brands will rely heavily on them.

June 2024

David Heinemeier Hansson · no longer holds

Ruby on Rails took off because its creator evangelized it by arguing its superiority against the competing alternatives.

March 2024

Noah Smith ·

Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

February 2024

Jakob Nielsen ·

Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users, after thirty years of trying.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Within about five years the user interface will be generated afresh each time a user opens an app, so different users will get drastically different designs.

Tuomas Artman ·

The MVP as a hacky product built to validate an idea no longer works: in a saturated market you have to build something substantially better from day one.

Tuomas Artman ·

To compete with limited resources, scope down who you are building for as much as possible and solve the problems of specific people.

November 2023

Julie Zhuo ·

Do not judge a product's beauty by its aesthetics; judge it by how it made you feel.

Julie Zhuo ·

If the people a product is designed for cannot generally agree that the design is good, it is not good.

Julie Zhuo ·

Obviousness comes from conforming to people's existing mental models: do not reinvent a common UI pattern unless the new one is at least twice as good.

Julie Zhuo ·

Better design does not mean more design: the most obvious designs are often invisible.

October 2023

Tyler Cowen ·

An inability to see the viewpoints of people unlike oneself is a genuine weakness in a social scientist, not merely a separate moral failing.

Tyler Cowen ·

Intelligent liberal elites can badly mismanage the colonies they govern, in ways that persist for decades or centuries.

Tyler Cowen ·

A highly dynamic economy that cheaply mass-produces robots may increase rather than decrease the risk of Malthusian resource dilemmas.

September 2023

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

TypeScript's type annotations cost more in friction than they return in safety, and a front-end framework is better off written in plain JavaScript.

July 2023

Paul Graham ·

The value of an audience does not grow anything like linearly with its size, so a handful of people who genuinely love the work is enough.

June 2023

Jakob Nielsen ·

Graphical interfaces have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.

Jakob Nielsen ·

Today's chat-based AI tools have deep-rooted usability problems and are not the interfaces we will be using in a few years; prompt engineering is a symptom, not a career.

Jakob Nielsen ·

AI is the first new user-interface paradigm in sixty years: intent-based outcome specification, where the user says what outcome they want rather than how to get it.

Jakob Nielsen ·

The graphical user interface will survive AI in a less dominant role: future AI systems will have hybrid interfaces that combine intent and command.

Marc Andreessen ·

The idea that AI will decide to kill humanity is a category error: it is math and code, built and controlled by people, not a living thing shaped by evolution.

May 2023

David Heinemeier Hansson ·

Requiring people to work from an office is a legitimate way to run a company, and remote-work advocates are wrong to claim moral superiority over it.

Amelia Wattenberger · by

Good tools make it clear how they should be used and how they should not; a chat box looks the same as a search box, a login form and a credit card field.

Amelia Wattenberger · by

Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementing and evaluating; a chatbot forces the switch every few seconds and kills flow.

Amelia Wattenberger · by

We should want more tools and fewer operated machines; the real AI game changers will have little to do with plain content generation.

Amelia Wattenberger · by

Chatbots are a terrible interface for large language models, because a text box has no affordances.

April 2023

Julie Zhuo ·

Design is not how a product looks; it is how it works, and all builders are designers.

Julie Zhuo ·

The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.

March 2023

Don Norman ·

Human-centred design ignores sustainability, inequity and bias, so design has to move to humanity-centred design that covers the whole ecosystem and the long term.

June 2022

Olivier Blanchard ·

A central bank can eliminate a self-fulfilling ('sunspot') debt crisis simply by credibly committing to buy as many bonds as needed at the low interest rate.

Olivier Blanchard ·

The probability of a self-fulfilling bad equilibrium in sovereign debt markets depends little on the debt level itself, but is much reduced by a rule linking the primary balance to debt service increases.

March 2022

Derek Sivers ·

Nothing you depend on to write should require an internet connection.

December 2021

David Heinemeier Hansson · no longer holds

Open source projects should adopt the commercial software playbook to compete for attention, and that professionalization is unequivocally good for open source.

August 2021

David Heinemeier Hansson · no longer holds

The complexity of a JavaScript bundling and transpiling toolchain is a bargain worth making, and the right default for building web applications.

July 2020

Wendy Behary ·

Narcissism runs along a spectrum rather than being a category, and schema therapy treats it by working back to what early life embedded.

February 2020

Frank Chimero ·

A design system built for the right reasons is reparative and one built for the wrong reasons is a weapon for displacement, because tools are always beholden to values.

July 2019

Don Norman ·

What gets called human error is design error: technology-centred design makes people do what machines are good at and then blames them.

Don Norman ·

Machines should do the parts of a task that people are bad at, so that people and technology work as partners on human terms.

Don Norman ·

Human-centred design starts by solving the root issue rather than the problem as presented, which is usually the symptom.

Don Norman ·

Experts should supply the facts and leave the methods to the people affected: a community will trust and implement a solution it chose itself, even one identical to the expert's.

Don Norman ·

The rule to defer judgment encourages design by committee; effective teams do not defer criticism, they create through it.

Ryan Singer · by

Over-specifying a design makes it harder to estimate, not easier: the more specific the work, the more hidden complexity a mockup commits the team to.

Ryan Singer · by

Interface copy is an affordance: reading it is an act that gives the user information for what to do next.

Ryan Singer · by

Work that is too fine too early commits everyone to the wrong details; shaped work is rough on purpose so designers and programmers can apply their own judgement.

Ryan Singer · by

Any specific mockup from someone senior biases everyone after them, so early design should be breadboards and fat-marker sketches that leave room for designers.

Ryan Singer · by

Shaping is primarily design work: the shaped concept is an interaction design seen from the user's perspective, and it takes technical literacy, not programming.

Craig Mod ·

Speed is a good proxy for engineering quality: software that slows down on simple tasks suggests engineers who are not obsessive about detail.

Craig Mod ·

The best touch interfaces are physical buttons; on a screen, to feel tactile is to move without latency.

April 2019

Sebastiaan de With ·

The most important thing a designer can do to make new technology usable is to simplify, and sometimes fewer features make a better product.

Sebastiaan de With ·

Given a complicated premise, the best thing a designer can do is stick to a conventional design and let the features surprise and delight.

Sebastiaan de With ·

You know a design is great when it disappears: a superb typeface, good signage or a well-designed door handle is never noticed, only the absence of frustration.

November 2018

Julia Evans ·

Tailwind is a good way to build a site you're happy with, even without strong CSS skills of your own.

February 2018

Frank Chimero ·

Directness is best: a great photo, a memorable illustration or a pitch-perfect sentence does most of the work, and fancy implementation has never moved the needle for clients.

November 2017

Jonathan Shedler ·

The APA's trauma treatment guidelines should be ignored, because they rest only on trials of therapies too brief to have worked.

July 2016

Derek Sivers ·

The feeds businesses design to be addictive are obstacles to anyone whose aim is to make something.

August 2015

Ramez Naam ·

After four more doublings of installed solar capacity, solar electricity will cost about 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas.

July 2015

Guillermo Rauch ·

The designer and programmer roles are converging, and the path from sketch to design to implementation is opening up to everyone with an idea.

Guillermo Rauch ·

An application's user interface should be defined as a pure function of its state.

Guillermo Rauch ·

Software estimates are poor because it is easy to underestimate the size of the state space: the complete list of questions a UI must answer is hard to come up with.

Guillermo Rauch ·

Lorem ipsum has had a good run; design with data instead.

February 2015

Frank Chimero ·

Every material has a grain, including the web, and designs that work against it end up weaker.

Frank Chimero ·

Designing for screens means arranging the elements first and assigning them a size afterwards, not drawing the box first.

Frank Chimero ·

Convenience means someone else makes your choices for you: the less you have to do, the less say you have.

November 2014

Guillermo Rauch ·

Minimizing network round trips is essential to a good user experience, because bandwidth keeps improving and latency will not.

Guillermo Rauch ·

The distinction between websites and web apps will disappear: a blog and a CRM are reigned by the same UX principles.

Guillermo Rauch ·

JavaScript should act immediately on user input to mask network latency, which should remove most spinners and loading messages.

September 2014

Don Norman ·

For designers, signifiers matter more than affordances: affordances control what is possible, signifiers are how a product communicates what to do.

December 2013

Jared Spool ·

Design is the rendering of intent: the designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make it real.

Jared Spool ·

Everyone who renders their intention is a designer, so the experienced designer's role shifts from owning the outcome to teaching the rest of the team to render theirs.

March 2013

Don Norman · no longer holds

Design thinking is a myth: designers have no special creative thought process, and the term is a public relations label for good old-fashioned creative thinking.

Don Norman ·

Design thinking is practised by all great thinkers, but design is the one field that tries to teach it as a systematic method rather than leave it to the exceptional.

Don Norman ·

Breakthroughs come from questioning the obvious, and the outsider's stupid question is where that power lies.

September 2012

Karri Saarinen ·

Founders, designers and developers need to develop their taste the way a sushi chef develops a palate, and appreciating culture is how.

August 2012

Dieter Rams · by

Innovative design develops in tandem with innovative technology and can never be an end in itself.

Dieter Rams · by

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness, but only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design makes a product understandable: at best it is self-explanatory.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design is unobtrusive: products that fulfil a purpose are tools, neither decorative objects nor works of art, and should leave room for the user's self-expression.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design is honest: it does not make a product seem more innovative, powerful or valuable than it is, and does not manipulate with promises that cannot be kept.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design is long-lasting: it avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design is thorough down to the last detail: nothing must be arbitrary, and care in the design process shows respect towards the user.

Dieter Rams · by

Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essentials.

November 2011

Bret Victor ·

Hands feel things and hands manipulate things, and most visions of future interfaces ignore both.

Bret Victor ·

Touchscreens are pictures under glass, a transitional technology; calling them the future of interaction is like calling black-and-white the future of photography.

Bret Victor ·

The future of interaction is a choice, not something that happens to us: people choose which visions to pursue and which research to fund.

Bret Victor ·

With an entire body at our command, the future of interaction should not be a single finger.

June 2010

Don Norman ·

Design thinking is a myth: designers have no special creative thought process, and the term is a public relations label for good old-fashioned creative thinking.

February 2010

Karri Saarinen ·

A product vision cannot be transferred through specs and bullet points; the product visionary has to engage in doing.

Karri Saarinen ·

A product needs a soul, and for that it needs one person of great taste who is its living, breathing aspect and gets furious about every small detail.

December 2009

Don Norman ·

Design research is great for improving existing product categories but essentially useless for new, innovative breakthroughs.

April 2009

Peter Thiel ·

The great task for libertarians is to escape politics in all its forms, rather than to win within it.

November 2008

David MacKay ·

Airplanes are already almost as energy-efficient as they could possibly be, so no redesign will radically improve their efficiency.

David MacKay ·

Wave power is unlikely to play a significant role in solving Britain's sustainable energy problem, though it may suit small remote-island communities.

David MacKay ·

Using tree planting to reverse climate change is not workable because it would require country-sized land areas.

June 2006

John Maeda ·

More emotions are better than fewer: when emotion comes first, do not be afraid to add ornament or layers of meaning.

March 2006

Bret Victor ·

For most software, interactivity is a curse for users and a crutch for designers.

Bret Victor ·

Information software design is graphic design: a software designer who decides what the user will see is doing graphic design whether she realizes it or not.

September 2003

Edward Tufte ·

The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content and turns everything into a sales pitch.

Edward Tufte ·

Visual reasoning works best when information is shown side by side, and the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity.

Edward Tufte ·

Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity.

Edward Tufte ·

Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure: if the numbers are boring you have the wrong numbers.

May 2003

Paul Graham ·

You need a good sense of design to judge good design, and there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize it and their confidence that they can.

Paul Graham ·

Big companies have software designed by committee to avoid disasters, so a startup wins design wars by having the same people design and implement the product.

Paul Graham ·

Premature design, deciding too early what a program should do, is as dangerous as premature optimization; specifications should be allowed to change on the fly.

Paul Graham ·

Great software requires a fanatical devotion to beauty: the parts no one is supposed to see should be beautiful too, because unseen details become visible in the aggregate.

Paul Graham ·

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one, because great software has to be seen from the user's point of view.

January 2003

Paul Graham ·

Design is for users, but you have to design what the user needs rather than what he says he wants.

Paul Graham ·

You are most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer, because looking down on the user corrupts the designer.

Paul Graham ·

To get good design you have to get close to your users and stay close, calibrating your ideas on actual users constantly.

Paul Graham ·

It is hard to design something good for users you look down on, because you cannot stay interested in something you do not like yourself.

Paul Graham ·

Good design requires a dictator: design by committee is a synonym for bad design, because a design has to be all of a piece.

February 2002

Paul Graham ·

Taste is not just personal preference: there is such a thing as good and bad design, and a maker's taste can be wrong.

Paul Graham ·

Good design is simple, because being forced to be simple forces a maker to face the real problem and deliver substance instead of ornament.

Paul Graham ·

Good design is timeless: if something is ugly it cannot be the best solution, and someone will eventually find a better one.

Paul Graham ·

Good design solves the right problem; a lot of bad design is industrious but misguided.

Paul Graham ·

Great designers make it look easy, and the ease is mostly an illusion: the conversational tone of good writing comes on the eighth rewrite.

Paul Graham ·

Good design is redesign: it is rare to get things right the first time, and experts plan to throw away early work.

Paul Graham ·

Good design can copy: the greatest masters decide it is more important to be right than original.

Paul Graham ·

The only style worth having is the one you cannot help; setting out to develop a personal style is the wrong goal.

Paul Graham ·

Great design comes disproportionately from a few hotspots, because nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.