Writing

Notes on craft, design and building

May 15, 20264 minEarly draft
From Airplane Cockpit to Self-Driving Car
Every wave of tooling strips knobs off the dashboard. A 747 cockpit became a manual car, became an automatic, became a Waymo you talk to. Software is on the same trajectory—and the endpoint is a single chat box where the whole job is telling the machine what you want.
May 15, 20264 minEarly draft
Liquid Death for Software
Software is about to be a commoditized product category. In commoditized categories, marketing and branding stop being decoration and start being the moat. Every bottled water company already figured this out—most B2B SaaS hasn't.
May 25, 20264 min
Touch the Canvas
In 1841, an American painter patented the paint tube. Twenty years later, Monet was standing in a field painting an actual haystack. Agentic coding is design's paint tube. The canvas is the running browser now.
May 15, 20264 minEarly draft
The Design System Is Your Company's Soul
If AI generates all your design and code, the design system isn't a productivity tool anymore. It's the constraint surface every future feature gets shaped against—and the only thing keeping your product from feeling like the median of the internet.
May 15, 20265 minEarly draft
Be Like the Japanese
Japanese craft works because the maker actually cares—and is personally accountable for whether the thing is good. American product design has outsourced both to A/B tests and metrics. In the age of AI, taking them back is the only thing that matters.