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Bridging the design-development gap as AI rises. There’s a frustrating gap in how development projects present themselves. What looks straightforward on GitHub — ‘just run this command!’ — quickly spirals into an odyssey of sudo permissions, package managers, and missing dependencies. As someone comfortable with design tools but less versed in development environments, I find myself mashing through terminal commands, hunting through Stack Overflow threads, and piecing together solutions without understanding the underlying context. What I’m missing isn’t the how, but the why. I get it: developers and engineers speak their language and rarely cater to non-developers. Robust beginner-friendly documentation isn’t what engineers want to be doing. Could these projects see greater adoption if they provided better context and more accessible instructions for newcomers or non-engineers? This includes guidance for people who’ve never worked with an API, or even know which directory they should be in to make package installs, let alone what packages are. The asymmetry between designer and developers is an interesting one. In my experience, designers build more of a bridge to developers because of wanting to communicate better with them. Designers start to code (sometimes as a forcing function) because they want to prototype and bring their designs to life quicker — no longer static and in turn opening their design and development possibilities. Developers might not return this in kind as they can build functional products without deep design knowledge or interfaces can be constructed using UI frameworks and libraries. Engineers are less pressured to become designers. They are paid more to specialize. Their bridge is to collaborate closely with design rather than to become a designer. Let’s talk about the new thing that is aiming to… supplant the above: AI. I can feed Claude or ChatGPT my entire codebase, give it files, have it sit inside my IDE, or even ask for code that does x, y, or z, and it’ll work with me to get these projects running. I’m comfortable with Claude, and it will give me cursory information on how and why. Of course, I don’t even know if the code is valid! And sometimes it’s not, but we work through it, and I come to a result that works. The knowledge transfer becomes even greater to non-existent. As I mentioned previously, vibecoding and generative codebases will likely increase as these LLMs serve solutions to ideas and concepts from the new generation of startups. Depth and understanding will be lost. When developers don’t understand the underlying principles of their code, debugging becomes a struggle; they can’t optimize for performance; and security flaws may abound. Technical debt will accrue in systems that become increasingly unknown and unpredictable. Broader innovation stutters because you’re stuck with what AI can give you. Homogeny ensues. For providers, the goal regarding LLM dependency, viewed from an investment perspective, is to mitigate or reduce cost and risk. In the end, entire software businesses are created around abstracting, simplifying, and making technology easier to use. What I lament is the focus on business opportunity, versus taking a more inclusive approach to bridging the gap between design and development or any other discipline with engineering. How do we get to better knowledge transfer? A tiered or tracked approach. One documentation track that exists for experts, and another that’s more verbose: context and explanation of the basics. Can open source projects and the like benefit from templates that encourage documenting the why along with the how? More collaboration is always good. I’ve benefitted hugely from working with engineering-centric product thinkers. I come at it from design with the knowledge of development, while my collaborators deal in code but find design a skillset to complement their coding skills. We meet in a middle ground that’s fruitful because we understand concepts. I am never shy about asking why something is done a certain way. And yes, AI. Can we use pattern recognition and matching to level up and progressively explain how and why things are built? There are many code-based helpers, but I’d love to look at how that a designer can utilize AI to pair program (something I do in trying to get to the why of it) — beyond working with an LLM. I’m imagining visual documentation or interactive tutorials that help guide you to various parts of a system. This knowledge gap has persisted for years, but AI is rapidly changing this landscape. While AI tools may bridge the divide between design and development by filling in missing context, I'm uncertain if this technological solution addresses the underlying communication problem — especially in an industry already stretched thin by time and resource constraints. This is an open dialogue for me at the moment, and I wanted to collect these thoughts at this time for later reflection. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
Memories are an interesting beast. I have certain core memories that are embedded deep in my mind. The years I attended SXSW from 2007-2012 encompass some of those. In 2011, I shared a house with longtime partner-in-crime Scott Robbin, Jeff Skinner, and Sam Felder. We were off South Congress up at the top of the hill and tucked away close to Curra's Grill on Oltorf. We were in a neighborhood where all the streets were named after Robin Hood characters: Friar Tuck Lane, Little John Lane, Sherwood Lane, Long Bow Lane, and Nottingham Lane. Because we had this house, we ended up hosting two separate nights of hangs and invited a bunch of people we knew. I made a video of it using the Panasonic Lumix GF-1, the much-lauded camera that my friend Craig Mod made famous. The video isn't much — but watching it back now, some 14 years later, I'm so very glad I put it together. Many of these people are still friends to this day[1]. Perhaps, one of the most poignant memories I have is shown at the end of the video — when just us housemates went bowling during some downtime, and I put Spoon's “The Way We Get By” in the video because on the drive back from the bowling alley, that song came on the radio. I'd never heard it before, but Jeff, Sam, and Scott all sang along to it, belting out the lyrics, windows down, as we're cruising south on I-35. We lost Sam years later. Sam was a great guy, and he is missed by many. I'm very, very glad I made that video, and that I can look back on it. And remember everyone there, but especially recollect, see, and hear Sam in it. RIP Sam. SXSW brought many things, and in particular memories of some of the best people on the internet I got to know, and became friends with. Thank you, all. In order of appearance: Jeff Skinner, Scott Robbin, Dave Rupert, Nathan Peretic, Reagan Ray, Jay Fannelli, Luke Dorny, Trent Walton, Scott Boms, Sam Felder, Patrick DiMichele, Christopher Cashdollar, Kevin Hoffman, Jack Auses, Rob Weychert, Jonathan Bowden, Phil Coffman, Noah Stokes, Harold Emsheimer, Paul Armstrong, Wilson Miner, Andrew Huff. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
The third culture difference. One of the hardest aspects of being a third culture kid and eventually adult is the difficulty in the journey of your identity. When you're young, the movement and culture- and context-switching are par for the course — it comes with the literal territory. As you get older, things happen: you transform into a chameleon and adaptation is one of your greatest assets. If you're me, you are seen as, sometimes advantageously, ethnically ambiguous. You somehow are part of the local fabric, depending on where you travel. And on the other hand, depending on where you reside over time, an assimilation or assimilations begin. It becomes part of your operating mode. As you get even older however, the mish-mash of identities and going with the flow start to untether any semblance of where you belong. Is it your birth country? Is it your citizenship? Is it the place you've lived the longest? Most are not like you. They may struggle with identity in completely valid and different ways. The third culture one is a big mash-up. I haven't completely met or known anyone quite like myself. Even a good friend who shared a similar path from college to the US, only overlaps with my experience to a point. My early years began elsewhere, which is a decisive difference. I have family, loved ones, and friends, but also my chosen or proximate family. They may not completely understand or ever understand, but I am thankful for their kinship, even if there's a part of me that will never feel completely whole. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
A meditation on entering flow state. A snack beckons. I stand up and head a few feet away to the kitchen area. A hojicha latte is on my mind, and also a bite. My brain is at operational capacity, and I am in a flow state. The metabolic need feels high, and I need to keep my energy up. I make the latte, iced with almond milk. I devour an oat bar. It’s the time of year when projects are in full swing. The seasons also drive business. Today started with syncing on UK time, getting on a call with Simon and then Jeff joining. We reviewed work and made plans. I know what’s immediately ahead of me today, and I steel myself mentally. It’s funny how the pressure from a timeline and deadline can focus you. Because I am a shokunin, I have my design mise en place laid out both in the mind, and at the physical desk. The plan appears, as I percolated on it after the call. I am now executing it. Windows are open all over: a browser with a tab count I can't even see, a few design tools, two deck tools, communication tools, and note tools. I stop to consider that I'm working across multiple variants of the same core pieces of software but in different flavors and with different purposes or are inputs from others collaborating. The mise en place is multi-modal. I am traversing them, wielding a strange authority over them all. After all afternoon and as the evening beckons, I share the file, toggling on collaboration. A message goes out to all parties. Flow state will come for us all. This is just the beginning. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
More in literature
“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at last, unlike all previous generations, we have found certitude. They thought so too.” I heard it expressed by commencement speakers and others in more casual conversation that ours is an unprecedented age of uncertainty and worry. “We have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing now,” said an articulate and highly educated woman. I wanted to remind her of, say, April 1861 in the U.S. and September 1939 everywhere. The phenomenon of presentism is like a disease that causes blindness. We attribute a sort of proud uniqueness to ourselves and our era, an understanding fostered by narcissism and historical ignorance. The speaker quoted at the top is Robert Conquest in “History, Humanity, and Truth,” the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered at Stanford University. Conquest is the historian who gave us, among other revelatory works, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986). He was not the first to note the moral parity of Hitler and Stalin, but, even before Solzhenitsyn, he documented it and published the results. Denying history and privileging oneself is a form of reality denial. In John Dryden’s “Secular Masque,” Janus says, “Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new,” though the new is merely the old repackaged. Conquest says in his lecture: “We spoke of fads and fashions. Fanaticisms and factiousnesses too, unfortunately. The Soviet experience was, of course, a terrible example of what can happen when an idea gets out of hand.” Conquest was doubly blessed with gifts, being a poet as well as a historian. In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each, including this: “Dead in the water, the day is done There’s nothing new under the sun, Still less when it’s gone down.” Presentism is more than a misguided focus. It is a prescription for disaster. “Without truth in history,” Conquest says in his lecture, “humanity is no longer humanity. It becomes prey to the mental distortions which have, in this century, already caused so many millions of deaths, and brought the world to the verge of ruin.” [John Dryden died on this date, May 12, in 1700 at age sixty-eight.]
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure. But it need not be without reward. Admitting failure, especially moral failure, is hard enough — to others,… read article
If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy tales. I remember as a kid reading some of his twelve “Coloured” Fairy Books. He was also a prolific poet and critic, though that work is largely forgotten. He remains best known not for his original productions but as a collector of other people’s work. Here’s how Lang begins the title essay in his Adventures Among Books (1905): “In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people? I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions.” That’s probably the finest almost-polite description of Coleridge’s gassiness I have ever encountered: “alien disquisitions.” He is the father of today’s critical bombast. Lang is something else – a dedicated reader whose bookish tastes started when he was a boy in Scotland. He continues: “The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.” Like other longtime readers, if I were ever to write an autobiography (fat chance), its scaffolding would be my reading history. That would reveal more about my nature than a recitation of schools attended and jobs held—mere externals. I enjoy the company of old-fashioned, unapologetic, non-academic bookmen like Lang. His example reminds me of John Gross’ bookish apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1991; rev. ed. 1991): “Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . . Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”
“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive. Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail: “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .” [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
