The design profession got exactly what it asked for: less time pushing pixels, more room for strategy. Most of us are using that time to argue about what designers should be instead. newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-territ...
I can attest to this. Many of my pieces run 2,000–3,000 words but actual reading time on those posts (from analytics) are always under the calculated reading time.
Jenny Wen’s "ship fast, iterate publicly, build trust through speed" approach makes sense for Anthropic. They're building greenfield AI products where nobody knows the right interaction patterns yet.
In case you’re looking to switch chatbots, say from a four-syllable one to a single-syllable one: claude.com/import-memory
That was the first time I’d seen that. So crazy!
Wow. LOL
Either abstain on principle or capitulate for the paycheck.
I don’t buy the binary. There’s a third path—use the tools to expand what your craft can produce, and people are already walking it.
Read the full newsletter.
2/2
newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-grief-an…
Developers and designers are independently grieving the same thing right now, and it took me a while to realize they’re not mourning the skill but the tribe.
The community that used to care about the craft now feels like it’s about speed, or pulling a slot machine lever on prompts.
1/
I thought the same thing. This might be the inflection point and NOT “AI-washing” as in the earlier layoffs from Amazon, Meta, etc.
Boom. I’m glad @anthropic.com is not caving in. Anti-mass domestic surveillance and anti-autonomous murderbots are moral red lines to have.
Best thing I heard today: “Claude Code is gaslighting me.” 🤣
Check out Reader from ReadWise and Inoreader. Both are great. Unsure if either support fetching feeds from an API though.
Just published a new newsletter wrapping up the theme of last week. Design is changing fast due to the new AI tools. Bleeding edge Silicon Valley companies have already made the shift. Our days of drawing pictures of designs to be implemented are numbered.
Everywhere I look, there’s a new ASCII project. I think it’s sort of a halo effect from Claude Code and the nostalgia designers and developers have for terminals. Anyway, I wrote a roundup of stuff that’s caught my eye.
#designsky
Designers vibe-coding these days...
I’ve been circling this for a while and finally wrote it down. The process shift, designing in code, what stays human. 4/4
rogerwong.me/2026/02/produc…
I’m hearing about designers dropping Figma entirely and designing in code with AI instead. It makes sense when you think about it—every pixel you push in Figma is a promise an engineer has to keep in a completely different medium. That’s a lot of translation for no reason. 3/
Everyone’s debating whether designers will lose their jobs to AI. That’s the headcount version of the question. The thing I keep thinking about is process—who does the work, how fast, and where the new bottlenecks are. 2/
I pointed Claude Code at our design system and got a working screen in three prompts. Didn’t open Figma once. That’s the part of my job I’ve spent decades doing—drawing pictures of apps and handing them to someone else to build. 1/
I’ve been thinking about what actually makes someone good at their job. Not competent, but good. The kind of good where you look at a screen and know something is off before you can articulate why. The kind where you can tell a product decision is wrong from across the room. #designsky
What a lovely piece. Thank you.
100%. And Dukes’s point about manual collection from experts vs automated collection via data is interesting. I didn’t really get it until I read Grazier’s post.
After writing about Wall Street + SaaS, I found a few pieces that pulled on that thread to something forward-looking.
- Shawn Smith on how Salesforce is in trouble
- Charlie Warren on what he calls “Vertical AI 2.0”
- Eli Dukes on the new moat: data recipes
- Duncan Grazier on the next AI platform
Yes, and in the post following the link to Rosenberg’s article, I link to Patrick Morgan’s about using text more because AI runs on text. (At least until world models get mature.)
Loving your blog too @aresluna.org !
Heard. And I acknowledge that design is never a straight line and everyone has their own process. You pick up on the more important point about intentionality. For me, writing and sketching before jumping into Figma are critical. But everything informs everything.
Zapier and IFTTT were supposed to "kill the software giants." They didn't. Instead, the system integration market grew to $410B by 2024.
Similarly, in 2000, I worked on Sega.com and our agency charged $1M for the design+build. Today, a Shopify site costs $39/mo. But the market has grown to $47B.
Last week, B2B software companies tumbled in the stock market, dropping over 10%. The prevailing sentiment is because AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code are now capable of doing things companies used to pay thousands of dollars for.
I think Wall Street is wrong and I have receipts.
Both shows by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy!
