LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Coding agents kept in their lane
An engineer at Linear scopes coding-agent tasks tight enough that they can't wander. The discipline is the same as scoping for a junior teammate.
Field Notes · Catalog
Field Notes
Tactics from the best design teams and individuals working today, with notes on how the work got made.
80 entries in the catalog
MAGGIE APPLETON
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
When coding stops being the bottleneck
Maggie Appleton reads Steve Yegge's chaotic agent orchestrator as speculative design fiction. The coding bottleneck is gone; the design bottleneck was always there.
MAGGIE APPLETON
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The PR is not a planning tool
Coding agents collapsed the implementation window. The alignment checkpoints that used to live inside it just disappeared, and the PR cannot carry their weight.
MICROSOFT DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Paper that had to earn its geometry
Microsoft spent years replacing plastic packaging with paper. The commitment was easy; getting every millimeter to behave was the actual work.
RAUNO FREIBERG
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
The minimap that became a blur
Rauno tried to solve 'scroll back' with a minimap. The minimap caused jank, the jank needed a blur, and the blur almost worked.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
An offsite without a Miro board
Linear took designers and engineers to Athens and shipped a working build by Friday. The trust that made the loop close, not the offsite, is what's worth lifting.
LINEAR
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Coding agents kept in their lane
An engineer at Linear scopes coding-agent tasks tight enough that they can't wander. The discipline is the same as scoping for a junior teammate.
NUBANK DESIGN
LDLR DESIGN FIELD NOTES
Killing darlings, statistically
Nubank ran a real A/B test on whether to scale or shut down an internal HR product. The data was unambiguous; the team's reaction to it was not.