DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The rule breaks before the agent does
Negreiros publishes a real ADR, three agent permissions, and the Safari bug that broke production twice while every rule was followed exactly as written.
Field Notes
Tactics from the best design teams and individuals working today, with notes on how the work got made.
New entries every Friday.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Fence the cascade, too
Skovhus turns a 1,000-PR styling migration into an argument about boundaries — contracts enforced by tooling, for a codebase increasingly written by agents.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The pieces were never the puzzle
Donald, a career design-systems hand, suspects we've outgrown them — and sketches the system that absorbs the product, plus what's left for people.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Delete the IDE, keep the context
Turakhia took the code editor away from an entire engineering org for two weeks — because the old way of working lives there, and agents can't read what's scattered across heads.
DESIGNER FUND
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Protect the search, not the output
Saarinen, Aufmann, and Kumar on using AI to widen design's search instead of shortening it — context gathering in, critique and copy deliberately out. Our first video field note.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The hours went up, not away
Qi's first data report from 47,900 workspaces: AI now writes half of everything in Linear, PRs are up 111% — and none of it has come back as saved time.
NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
A demo is not a distribution
Budiu translates eval rigor into UX-research grammar — representative inputs, repeated runs, confidence intervals — and retires the one-good-output proof for good.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Local first, system later
A case for local components as signals, not violations — designers build in place, and the system team governs what earns promotion to the library.
NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Own the string, not the wind
Sunwall names the attachment that burns designers out — ownership of things they can't control — and shows where to reattach it, scenario by scenario.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Fence the field, don't script the path
Wolting explains how Linear replaced predictability with boundaries — system prompt, tool design, run scope, custom harness — and let the agent find its own way inside them.
DESIGN SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Three truths, no liar, one referee
Williams calls the end of the single source of truth: Figma holds intent, Storybook behavior, production reality — and reconciling them is a job nobody has posted yet.
MICROSOFT DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Trust is set before setup ends
Dhaka and Sikdar watched sales reps meet an AI agent for the first time and distill five onboarding principles — deliver the aha before asking for configuration.