I haven't seen The Roots live since I lived in Berlin many years ago. That sentence covers more time than I want to think about. So when I heard they were coming to the Blue Note in LA, I immediately knew I wanted to attend. The band and the venue did not disappoint. Watching Black...

Lately, I've been questioning one of the more beloved words in our industry: "craft." It shows everywhere - in portfolios, product copy, and job listings. But is it helping us describe what we do? I think craft might be the wrong fit for modern design and development. Saying Goodbye to Craft Let me preface this...

The redwoods have always been my happy place! There's something about their quiet strength and scale that just calms my brain, and I just saw a documentary that took me there! Last night I caught Giants Rising at the Rivian Theater in Laguna Beach, and it completely delivered. The film is a stunning tribute to...

The UX developer role has always been hard to explain to everyday folks. “So you design stuff?” Not exactly. “So you code stuff?” Sort of. For years, people who sit between design and engineering have fought for a seat at a table that wasn’t really built for them. Then AI showed up and flipped the...

I keep seeing the same conversation play out online. AI is going to replace designers. AI is going to replace developers. AI is going to make everything faster and cheaper, and we should all be terrified or thrilled depending on who you follow on LinkedIn. But there's something I think people are sleeping on. AI...

Satya Nadella said AI would fuel a "creative revolution." GitHub told us Copilot would let developers "focus on creative and strategic work." Sam Altman measures ChatGPT's success by the percentage of human work it can accomplish. So why am I spending more time reviewing and fixing AI output than I ever imagined? I'm not here...

I came across a post by Cassidy Williams a few weeks ago about LLM discoverability. The gist: she asked ChatGPT some tech discovery questions, noticed it didn't recommend her, then asked why. The AI gave her a list of things to fix. She fixed them. It worked. I read that and immediately thought: what happens...

I came across a Medium post titled "AI Will Replace 70% of Design System Work." The premise is that most design system work, documentation, component building, token management, accessibility audits, is "structurally automatable," and that the real value lies in governance. The author argues that teams need to move "upward from execution to orchestration" or...

I've been tinkering with something lately that I think more design system teams should pay attention to. I'm trying to teach AI how my design system works through Claude skills and Cursor rules. The problem AI has with your design system If you've used any AI coding tool to generate UI, you've seen this. You...

In software, a dependency is a risk you accept. It's a package you didn't write, maintained by someone you've never met, that can break your entire application if it disappears. Good engineering means knowing which dependencies are worth the risk and which ones aren't. Right now, I'm watching our industry decide that people aren't worth...

This weekend, I wired my website into the AT Protocol. It took an afternoon and one stubbornly old config file, and now my writing lives on the network itself. The short version: Bluesky rolled out support for Standard.site, a set of shared lexicons that let long-form writing live on the AT Protocol itself. In plain...

After years of building, maintaining, and supporting in-house design systems with real tokens, governance, versioning, support, and contribution models, I recently found myself building with Tailwind and shadcn. Thanks, AI! I'm familiar but relatively newish to these tools, so take this for what it is. I'm not anti-AI. I use it every day. But I've...

At some point, I stopped knowing what was on my Mac. A tool here, a dependency my agent dropped in there. Collectively, a mystery. I was losing track. To help, I created stockpile. Not all at once. It was gradual. A tool I installed to try out six months ago. A dependency that an agent...

Everyone's building custom skills for their AI coding assistants right now. Commit helpers, linting rules, project scaffolding. Little markdown files that make Claude Code do things your way instead of the default way. I've been doing the same thing. But the more skills I wrote, the more I wanted them to follow me between machines...

I had done everything right. Or at least, everything the current playbook says to do. Used AI to fill the gaps, reviewed it myself, then handed it off to more AI. This past week, I got handed a project that required backend work. Not because I have backend experience - I don't, really - but...

It's 4 pm on a Friday. I've approved my last PR of the week. I've reviewed more code today than I wrote. I got a lot done, or at least, the dashboard says I did. But I'm sitting here, and I can't think straight. Not in the dramatic, existential-crisis way. Just... tired. A kind of...

Tailwind usage is at an all-time high. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic dropped 40% over two years. AI didn't kill Tailwind. AI now picks Tailwind. Every prompt. Every team. Without anyone choosing. And the moment it picks something else, every codebase built on top of that decision is on its own. "75% of the...

Everyone's arguing about which AI tool writes the best code or generates the best images. Meanwhile, the companies building these systems are racing to ship faster, raise more, and consolidate more power than any tech cycle before them. And a small group of researchers, journalists, and engineers have been trying to get your attention about...

"It's interesting how AI is good at the things I don’t understand, but is somehow dogshit at the things I’m good at..." - Anonymous

Last month, a Cloudflare engineer used AI to rebuild a major open-source project in under a week. Cost about $1,100. It shipped to production. Around the same time, a different Cloudflare team used AI to fork another project and silently stripped out the security protections the original maintainers had spent years adding. That also shipped....