Local throughput optimization always externalizes costs onto downstream colleagues.

There is no denying that LLMs are the new kid on the block. Our marketing director (that’d be me) said that if we don’t write something about it, we will be left behind, so we ran an experiment, we went hardcore on it, and… TL;DR, we don’t fully buy it, yet.

Recently, on a whim, I posted about how I’ve been experimenting with Figma Make – building out a few page templates to help collaborators explore ideas. Below is an example I used in the post of how I leveraged Figma’s new AI tool to prototype at Dropbox and test ideas.

Every now and then I get an odd tendency to just go off and make something. It’s why I made a typeface. It’s why I made a mobile music app. And it’s why I made another mobile app, It Makes Noise.

I write, to think. More than anything this essay is an attempt to think through a bunch of hard, highly speculative ideas about how AI might unfold in the next few years. A lot is being written about the impending arrival of superintelligence; what it means for alignment, containment, jobs, and so on. Those are all important topics.

With faster iteration cycles and AI tools helping people stretch further up the stack, more product builders are reinventing their roles.

For a design system program where the goal is often stable, high quality, durable output, how much instability, lack of quality, or impermanence can we tolerate in our tools? That’s the question Nathan Curtis and I asked the design system community for Episode 060 of The Question.

I think a lot of blogging is reactive. You read other people’s blogs and you’re like, no, that’s totally wrong. A part of what we want to do with this scenario is say something concrete and detailed enough that people will say no, that’s totally wrong, and write their own thing.

On iOS, these are in the tertiary keyboard. You have to go to the keyboard with the numbers and common symbols then click the symbols button to see the angle brackets. Then you need to swap back to the main keyboard to type an element name, potentially move to the second keyboard for quotation marks if you want to add an attribute to your HTML element, and go back to…

I write, to think. More than anything this essay is an attempt to think through a bunch of hard, highly speculative ideas about how AI might unfold in the next few years. A lot is being written about the impending arrival of superintelligence; what it means for alignment, containment, jobs, and so on. Those are all important topics.