Design died and its funeral was held in a LES storefront. In Vatican City, the Pope declared holy war on AI, while in SF, the vibes took a turn for the worse. I scrolled through it between a bleating pump, a sleeping newborn, and an algorithm still talking about Bed Stuy stoops and ube ice cream. If that means nothing to you, congratulations, you’ve had a blissfully offline May. For the rest of us, let’s debrief.
Days before Anthropic shipped Claude Design, their CPO resigned from Figma’s board. After the launch, Figma’s stock dipped roughly 7% and Design Twitter declared the design tool dead. Then came Q1 earnings: revenue +46% YoY to $333M, net dollar retention at 139%, followed by Figma’s own on-canvas agent, as well as a slew of Figma Make updates. Decidedly not dead.
Figma leaned into the meme anyway, hosting a “Design Is Dead” pop-up funeral during NY Tech Week, where visitors could mourn and pick up a hat. Designer Fund’s annual AI in Design report filled in the real shift: 91% of designers now use AI weekly, up from 54% last year, and half shipped AI-generated code to production—ending the ‘should designers code?’ debate. No clarity around what a designer even is anymore, but the old workflow is dying. The work is not.
Jenny Zhu@jennyzzhu
“Funeral” haul @figma
6:52 PM · May 30, 2026 · 7.42K Views
2 Replies · 3 Reposts · 123 Likes
The Pope entered the chat. In Magnifica Humanitas, his 42,000-word encyclical, Pope Leo XIV framed AI as the defining moral test of the era, calling for its “disarming” and global regulation. The document argues that machines can simulate intelligence but not dignity, and warns that optimizing for output risks reducing humans to data points. “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ,” he writes, “the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”
Katie Prejean McGrady@KatiePMcGrady
“Didn’t I just write an entire encyclical about this tech stuff?”
2:34 PM · May 27, 2026 · 730K Views
68 Replies · 2.37K Reposts · 27.1K Likes
Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das posted that SF’s AI wealth divide had reached a new psychological register: ~10k people at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia have cleared $20M+, while everyone else faces layoffs, obsolescence, and the creeping suspicion that a “well-paying but <$500k” job is the short end of the stick. Backlash rightly treated the complaint as Valley brain rot, calling it “pathetic” and criticizing the <500k framing. From signull: “previous gold rushes didn’t credibly threaten the safe path simultaneously while dangling the jackpot.”
Emily Segal of NEMESIS—formerly of the group that coined “normcore”—has a name for the AI-era aesthetic glut: “tasteslop.” In her account, LLMs don’t have taste so much as index it, and “sloptimization” floods culture with decent-looking artifacts that strip taste of its social, scene-based roots. Rimowa suitcases and Dieter Rams tomes, and other “good taste” tokens get scraped, recombined, and regenerated until they’re severed from the worlds that once gave them meaning. Want to hone your taste? You’ll have to do more than read books and watch movies; taste lives in shared contexts, not content piles.
Rachel Tashjian Wise@theprophetpizza
we have now reached the point at which "talking about taste" is tasteslop
3:19 PM · May 22, 2026 · 44.3K Views
11 Replies · 100 Reposts · 699 Likes
Startup culture has always rewarded intensity, but lately the intensity has become the point. Will Manidis calls it grindslop: companies where suffering is the product. Investor Harry Stebbings provided exhibit A: a breathless profile of Corgi Insurance glorifying 7-day workweeks and office mattresses. Linear CEO Karri Saarinen offered a counter‑narrative: yes, sometimes you need sprints and heroics, but what actually compounds is a culture that can sustain high‑quality work. Corgi CEO Nico Laqua doubled down, comparing the operation to the Manhattan project. “Hopefully the blast radius will be contained,” replied Karri. Ziiiing.
Everlane, the millennial DTC icon of “radical transparency,” sold to Shein for $100M. For a certain internet, it felt like a moral collapse; for everyone else, a predictable outcome. A brand built on selling “better consumption” couldn’t survive a market that rewards cheaper, faster, more. The Obama-era idea that you could shop your way into virtue has fully run out of road.
atrophy wife@ivadixit
Alarmed and baffled to discover that so many of my fellow millennials have such strong feelings about Everlane in 2026. It’s a brand it’s not your friend, let’s wrap it up.
9:34 PM · May 19, 2026 · 2.71K Views
3 Replies · 46 Likes
Anthropic hires Karpathy, files to go public. OpenAI reorgs. Layoffs at Meta, Upwork, Webflow. You can no longer Google “disregard.” NYT struggles to keep hallucinated errors out of print. General Catalyst drops a slick ad; A16Z loses their shit. MagicPath ships multiplayer canvas for humans and agents. New Aesthetics grants. (Congrats, Karyn + Robin!) End of an era: Henry Modisett steps down as Perplexity’s Head of Design, passes the baton to my lovely husband. Bravo, Henry!
Government UFO ephemera: “the best thing to happen to graphic designers since Helvetica.” Ben Lerner on his latest book. Sam Kriss: If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you. Is Renaissance the new Corporate Memphis? Or is it words set in Instrument over an Impressionist background? (Either way, do we need to name it?) Trudy Painter’s clothes. A Rothko for your weather. nyc.gov/summer.
The History of Software Design is looking for a brand person
A24 Labs is hiring a product designer, a dev ops engineer, and a couple of “very explorative engineers and technical artists with taste”
Fisk is hiring a Studio Designer (deadline: June 12)
A month of things ending and not ending. Design, Everlane, the should-designers-code debate, SF’s faith in meritocracy. None of it fully resolved, all of it still in the feed. Newborn permitting, I’ll be back next month. What did I miss?
Paul Graham@paulg
One of my favorite pictures ever. 17 years ago.
2:27 PM · May 27, 2026 · 2.18M Views
289 Replies · 629 Reposts · 20.6K Likes
—Carly
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.