Who wants agents at the beach

Happy Friday!

I prepped this newsletter before leaving for a week in Portugal, so I’m at the beach now. So short newsletter this week.

1. If you’d like a free week of Claude Code, here are two guest passes. They are first come first served.

2. If your team needs some experienced help setting up evals, you should talk to me. I have some consulting bandwidth late August and early September.

And no, I’m not “managing my agents from the beach”. What’s wrong with people?

But seriously, the UX.md discussion last week had me thinking, the best way to evolve this stuff is probably to share and try things, as opposed to making a lot of decks and frameworks which is something UX people often fall in to. So I am sharing our internal UX.md file for Sputnik Intelligence here. Have a look, let me know what you think.

Quotes

“The tower doesn’t need to be occupied to change what gets written.” Rebecca Wicker.

“People really don’t like when a coworker’s chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they’d be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker.” Greg Brockman, via Simon Willison.

“The pixels are there. The product is not.” Aurélie Radom.

👀 Interesting this week

Design.md: the one standard file carries your visual identity, for humans and agents, Patrick Neeman. Google Labs open-sourced the format in April: eight sections in fixed order, YAML tokens above the fence, rationale below. Tokens are normative, so when the prose and the tokens disagree, the tokens win.

“Skip the prose and you have a palette; write the prose and you have a brief.”

No New Name Has Replaced “UX”, Rachel Banawa. 604 tech and design professionals were asked to name the field in their own words. “UX” is still the default and every alternative stays fragmented.

This AI notetaker won’t sell surveillance to your boss, Casey Newton on Granola.

“I think we’ll probably end up in a world where in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed.”

Creative Technologists are moving from the margins to the center, Ioana Adriana Teleanu. A sixty-year lineage from 9 Evenings at Bell Labs in 1966 through Muriel Cooper’s Visible Language Workshop and Maeda’s Processing to today’s Design Engineer listings.

Why airlines are finally waking up to context-aware design, Zeeshan Khalid. Japan Airlines rewrites its home screen in real time through the security-checkpoint cutoffs; most airline apps still show you the booking screen 23 minutes before boarding.

“The app knows. It has all this information. But it’s making you work for it.”

Open letters about AI development, Simon Willison. Three of them in two weeks: Microsoft’s open-weights letter with 235 signatures, Anthropic refusing to sign and publishing its own three days later, then “Pacing the Frontier” with 1,324 frontier-lab employees asking the US government to help slow automated AI research.

This CPO regrets that product management exists, Tom Verrilli.

The River, The Mountain and The Fog, Tom Bradley. Eddie Obeng’s taxonomy: river is a known outcome by a known path, mountain is a known outcome by an unknown path, fog is neither. Projects change type while you’re in them.

“These days the rivers seem to roar, all of the mountains are snow-capped, and the fog seems thicker than ever.”

Leopold & exponential markets, Azeem Azhar. Situational Awareness LP, $45B at its peak, roughly 4x leverage on the AGI capex build-out, was forced to liquidate after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 28.6% from its June high while software gained.

ICYMI 2026-08-01: IA Problem; AI Costume, Jorge Arango. Includes a Commoncog case on the Swiss watch industry: quartz wasn’t the disease, protectionism and bad incentives were, quartz was the coup de grâce.

Health and happiness,
Peter