Tactics from the best design teams and individuals working today, with notes on how the work got made.
New entries every Friday.
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.
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.
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.
Merholz borrows Scott's legibility lens to explain why design chronically struggles: businesses only see determinate work, and design's most valuable moves are indeterminate.
Fuller files the AI panic in a 70-year lineage of design deaths — with AWS and Anthropic design leaders on the great blurring, and Figma literally staging the funeral.
Yeo turns murmurations and goose formations into an operating model — async telemetry, rotating leads, domain pods, three anchors, and a scheduled molt for design debt.
Nubank threw open its studio: 400 seats, a brand refresh, case tracks, and Eismann closing. Design culture as a public event, at 135-million-customer scale.
Stone oversees engineering, product, and design as one system. Her hiring bar for the AI era: systems thinkers who see the whole machine, with fluency expected of everyone.
Fernandez turns Butterfield's 2013 promise into a working framework — utility, usability, feel — with named failure modes and a gut-check: are we proud to ship this?
Hoang names the discipline forming around agents as users — access, context, tools, orchestration — and argues for parallel paths built for two different kinds of minds.
Williams, from Morales's talk: latency was your real reviewer. When agents erase the wait, the checking must be encoded — governance shipped as an output, not a fight.
The forty-minute scope debate now costs more than generating the diff. Abuadas's move: produce a constrained probe, then argue from evidence instead of vibes.
