Entire ecosystems emerged from the westward settlement of the New World. Wild landscapes were converted to farms for livestock, lumber, produce. The key requirements were access to good soil, water, and trade routes. Capital formation will increasingly revolve around token economics and autonomous AI instead of the waking hours of human knowledge workers in the classic mold. The diffusion of AI will not solely rely on model advancements so much as the richness of the ecosystems that emerge around the technology. What good is lumber that can’t find its way to settlement and cities? What good are farms that are susceptible to predators and pests? Who benefits from fruit that spoils in transit? A continent’s worth of new problems and opportunities await us on the other side of this economic transition.

Ship the best product. Use lots of AI, some AI, maybe no AI. Just be the best.

Feedback is a gift. Critical feedback doubly so.

You can really tell when something was made with care. You feel the hours. You feel the restraint. You feel the thousand small no’s. It’s the only material that can't be faked. Japanese call this Tamashii (魂), meaning soul of something made with devotion. The world has enough things. It's starving for soul.

Imagine a circle, with a little spinner on it that you can flick. The circle is 80% red and 20% yellow, like a yellow pie slice. You flick the spinner. It spins, and slowwwly stops. Where did it land?

non-designers who have never designed anything: "designers are cooked!" people who have worked in code, want to work in code, always will work in code: "future of design is code!" companies selling tokens: "move that button 4px with a prompt!" designers:

Me and Claude working together

Receiving a letter in the mail addressed to “Our Neighbor” is the written equivalent of someone calling you “Sport”

Vibe Coding Is the New Product Management “There’s been a shift—a marked pronouncement in the last year and especially in the last few months—most pronounced by Claude Code, which is a specific model that has a coding engine in it, which is so good that I think now you have vibe coders, which are people who didn’t really code much or hadn’t coded in a long time, who are using essentially English as a programming language—as an input into this code bot—which can do end-to-end coding. Instead of just helping you debug things in the middle, you can describe an application that you want. You can have it lay out a plan, you can have it interview you for the plan. You can give it feedback along the way, and then it’ll chunk it up and will build all the scaffolding. It’ll download all the libraries and all the connectors and all the hooks, and it’ll start building your app and building test harnesses and testing it. And you can keep giving it feedback and debugging it by voice, saying, “This doesn’t work. That works. Change this. Change that,” and have it build you an entire working application without your having written a single line of code. For a large group of people who either don’t code anymore or never did, this is mind-blowing. This is taking them from idea space, and opinion space, and from taste directly into product. So that’s what I mean—product management has taken over coding. Vibe coding is the new product management. Instead of trying to manage a product or a bunch of engineers by telling them what to do, you’re now telling a computer what to do. And the computer is tireless. The computer is egoless, and it’ll just keep working. It’ll take feedback without getting offended. You can spin up multiple instances. It’ll work 24/7 and you can have it produce working output. What does that mean? Just like now anybody can make a video or anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don’t have one already in the App Store, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to what we’re going to see. However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used or they’re competitive? No. I think it’s going to break into two kinds of things. First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there’s no demand for average. Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job. So first of all, you just have more shots on goal. So there will be more of the best. There will be a lot more niches getting filled. You might have wanted an application for a very specific thing, like tracking lunar phases in a certain context, or a certain kind of personality test, or a very specific kind of video game that made you nostalgic for something. Before, the market just wasn’t large enough to justify the cost of an engineer coding away for a year or two. But now the best vibe coding app might be enough to scratch that itch or fill that slot. So a lot more niches will get filled, and as that happens, the tide will rise. The best applications—those engineers themselves are going to be much more leveraged. They’ll be able to add more features, fix more bugs, smooth out more of the edges. So the best applications will continue to get better. A lot more niches will get filled. And even individual niches—such as you want an app that’s just for your own very specific health tracking needs, or for your own very specific architectural layout or design—that app that could have never existed will now exist.”

Love is the most important force in the universe. Love for your family, friends, neighbors, art, mission, knowledge, company, country, world. Without love, there’s no humanity.

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” —Teller

Make it work (AI). Make it fast (also AI). Make it beautiful (still human).

Rewind 2025. Play 2026. #MadeByMonogram

the science of taste

There are no limits anymore. Anyone can do anything. The only limiting factors are agency and ambition. Never has a college degree, work experience, network, even the accumulation of knowledge been worth less. You can just ship things.

Weirdest compliment ever 🤪

I must ultimately defer to the brand gurus in my field, but the power of brand design to me has always been its extensibility: