119 Photos and videos
Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology.
My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same.
Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep.
The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression.
Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas.
But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market.
The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon.
These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense.
No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all.
Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade.
Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.
Apr 18
Whether design belongs in Figma or Claude Design is a distraction from a bigger shift.
1️⃣ Design will become autonomous. More helpful to think of it as 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙸𝙶𝙽.𝚖𝚍, used by your coding agents running your software factory.
2️⃣ Specialized “personal” design tools generated by teams will proliferate. Design is a capability, not a tool. I agree with @rsms that there are many facets of design, and multiple tools are required.
I love prompting in @v0 and it’s become the place where I can channel my inspiration, explore, communicate. But I’m also seeing a new generation of products that use the v0 Platform API or Sandbox and put design on autopilot.
There are next-generation agents like @tryflint and trybloom.ai generating design & brand systems and maintaining them autonomously. Flint can even keep your website and content up to date and its design consistent. No human prompting needed.
From this we will see the emergence of fully autonomous companies with agents like nanocorp.so and durable.ai, which go a step further and grow and advertise your business.
tl:dr; The future looks very different from the present. AI is a true discontinuity. The “here’s the existing thing but with AI and ${jobTitle} is cooked” is short-sighted.
21
63
618
108,020
Sumu retweeted
Apr 17
73
471
2,471
588,443
when software had a soul
there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.
the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.
software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.
the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.
nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.
somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.
A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.
and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.
now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.
which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.
when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.
this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.
here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.
AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.
the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.
if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.
that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.
142
344
2,486
420,983
Fishes dont like to be touched ig..
reallyfishy.vercel.app
Mar 28
My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):
I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept):
Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow
252
