Reads
A personal selection of articles and reflections that fuel my curiosity and passion for the web.
Selected articles
Luke Wroblewski
Finding the Role of Humans in AI Products
To use a metaphor we're all familiar with: a manager keeps tabs on a handful of direct reports. A director manages managers. A CEO manages directors. At each layer, the person at the top trades direct understanding for leverage. They see less of the actual work and more of the summaries, status updates, and roll-ups. Which raises two questions. First, how far up the stack can humans actually go? Agent orchestration? Orchestration of orchestration? Where does it break down? Second, at whatever level we land on, what skills do people need to operate there?
Robin Rendle
Reading without reading
« It’s a kind of instantaneous scanning of a word or two at a time: the hour on a smartwatch, or the label on microwave dial, or the URL in your web browser. I like to call this interfacing, because it’s less about digesting information (or experiencing the text) than about interacting with your immediate surroundings. You don’t think of it as reading at all — it just happens. » Interfacing is a great word! I realize now just how limiting it is to describe all types of reading as simply reading, as if all flowers are flowers or all birds are birds. The world is more complicated! There is nuance here! And of course the way we process information is more complex than a single word can hope to describe.
Dennis Muller
dennis muller on X
the quality of your work correlates with the quality of work you decide not to ship
Kevin Boone
Kevin Boone: The “small web” is bigger than you might think
That there’s still a place for private, non-commercial websites on an Internet dominated by advertising is something we should celebrate.
Christopher K Wong
Why many employers want Designers to think like PMs, not Devs
One of design’s biggest superpowers is something that you might not realize: it’s the ability to ask the right questions. Whether it’s asking users pointed questions during testing or asking questions of the PM to understand product use cases, this strategic curiosity has been one of the most highly prized skills among design leaders.
itsnicethat
Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs
The collapse of design’s stability and power has forced a lot of people to rethink why they’re designing at all. [...] As Mira Joyce puts it, “Caring deeply and openly about your craft shouldn’t feel embarrassing. It feels necessary to me.”
Luke Wroblewski
LukeW | Designing Perplexity
The best software comes when people with strong opinions on how it should work are working directly on the code.
Luke Wroblewski
LukeW | Designing Perplexity
Product mechanics (how it works) matter more than UI aesthetics. This comes from game design thinking: mechanics > dynamics > aesthetics
Simon Sterne
Prompt Hoarders: 7 Reasons Saving Prompts Won’t Make You Creative
Prompts aren’t evil. AI isn’t the villain. The real danger is forgetting that thinking is still our job.
Brett Williams
Figma will make you rich. Claude won't.
The visual designers who thrive in the next decade won't be the ones who reluctantly learned to code in Claude or the like. They'll be the ones who went so deep into their craft that they became irreplaceable. Who got so fast and so good that clients seek them out specifically for their expertise. Because in a world where everyone can build, the people who can make it beautiful will be the most valuable people in the room.