distealling
Not sure distilling feels like stealing, but also not sure it doesn’t. distealling
Peter Van Dijck
UX, AI and Climate
Latest posts
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Long and detailed post on the dysfunction of AI in the enterprise Which is mostly the dysfunction of the enterprise
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I’m writing a book with AI, which is a lot of fun, and now I’m building a native MacOS app to make the workflow even better
Claude Anda Walk
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Claude And Paper is good. Claude Anda Walk is also good. "You've hit your session limit" -> take a walk.
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Ethan Mollick: we are leaving the Paleo Codic : the artisinal code era, where if you needed a novel program, you would commission a local codesmith or code guild to hand-craft a work of code for you, bespoke.
Paleo Codic
The age of humans writing code may be called the Paleocodic
Context Design
Context Architecture
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Paz : Context Architecture applies information architecture principles to AI systems, helping agents interpret information and produce better, user aligned responses.
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MC Dean at Google wrote about A Constellation of Emerging Design Roles , looking like this: Design Engineer AI Experience Designer Director of AI Design and Experience Computational Designer Prompt Designer AI Designer Orchestrator (or AI Orchestrator) AI Systems Designer The Great Role Confusion of 2026
Great Role Confusion
AI is unbundling skills and roles and activities, causing the great 2026 role confusion. What's my title? What do I do?
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In the Great Role Confusion of 2026, Boris Cherny at Anthropic came up with these : Prototyper : comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship Builder : quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra Sweeper : cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance Grower : takes a product that has been built and…
Member of the UX Staff
Bell Labs introduced the “Member of Technical Staff” title in the mid-20th century (well before Xerox PARC was founded in 1970). It was held by legendary figures in computing and physics, including Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie when he joined in 1967. Bell Labs deliberately designed the title to serve specific cultural goals: Flattening Hierarchies: Instead of using rigid corporate rankings like…
Deep Mind
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This is really smart . So, Let's say we have a UI library. Agents use it and mis-use it. How do we make that better? Evals! Create a large set of example UI prompts. Run the AI generation with that library. Identify the bad bits. Now write AI guidance to avoid those bad bits. Run them again. Repeat until it looks consistently good.
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The norms around AI use are taking shape. In engineering, its: AI can write the code, but you take ownership. (With some variations). In academia (again with lots of variations): Help me, but don't touch the paper!
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The details will be off, but this is a useful way of thinking about where "design" is going. A Constellation of Emerging Design Roles Design Engineer AI Experience Designer Design Orchestrator Computational Designer Prompt Designer Context Engineer AI Product Strategist Responsible AI Designer That's a good first draft. My thinking on these has been: Context Designer. Context engineering is about…
Sophie Leroy
Attention Residue
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Attention Residue by Sophie Leroy . Here . I’ve spent the last 17 years studying the brain and how we deal with having to constantly switch focus. What research shows is that, generally, the brain finds it difficult to switch between tasks. In particular, my research reveals that, as we switch between tasks (for example from a Task A to a Task B), part of our attention often stays with the prior…
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Stealing Is A Skill
Skill Erosion
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Another study on AI eroding skills : A study 2 of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and…
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Reading up on AG-UI and A2UI and other acronyms for streaming UI with agents.
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I revived the XFML spec , not that it's relevant today, but just as an archive.
Wiki Now
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How Madrid built its metro cheaply : In 1995, the Madrid Metro was 71 miles (114 kilometers) long. That would make it the 51st longest metro in the world today, reasonable considering Madrid is the 57th largest city in the world by population. Yet 1995 was the beginning of a revolutionary building spree. Over the course of the next 12 years, the metro grew by 126 miles (203 kilometers), nearly…
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This is actually Very Good: https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-the-inuit-know-and-ai-doesnt
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We are using the wrong words for AI: (intelligence, hallucination, AGI, consciousness, agent) Medicine used ‘‘hallucination’ first to describe sensory errors in the brain . Machine learning borrowed it later, for structural errors in algorithms. There is a tension now from people who want to lock the old meaning down, as though technical precision were the only valid way to see language.
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Dual Translation , ( link ) had not heard about that before but totally fits. "Dual translation" — that's what non-native speakers perform every time a manager says "coming out of left field." The phrase doesn't arrive as language. It arrives as a puzzle with two locked doors. This is called cognitive load stacking : the listener must decode the figurative register first, then map it onto a…
Dual Translation
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I migrated a set of subscribers from Stripe to Lemon Squeezy . Their tech support managed it. It was great.
Lemon Squeezy
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I spent a few hours and built a custom CRM for my own projects. It's got a great UI and the usual CRM-y things It's really flexible My Claude Cowork connects to it, so I can just talk to Claude and have it do things. No API charges. It includes a research skill (check out people's online profiles and all that) It's free to run It took about 4 hours total It's all mine baby
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Google launches a spec for Llm Wiki a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter, with a small set of agreed-upon conventions that let wikis written by different producers be consumed by different agents without translation.
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Karpathys Llm Wiki pattern
Llm Wiki
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I had Fable build a CRM for me.
In Defense Of Slop
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In Defense Of Slop , it's gotten very good.
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At Anthropic lots of titles collapse into member of the technical staff . Amazon is changing job titles to "builder". So let's see; it's true that AI is collapsing roles and disciplines. Different specializations still matter, also true. Not sure where this ends up. But it's not impossible that the traditional design/research/product/engineering division breaks up.
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Mollick on the latest Anthropic model, Fable: It is possible the sidelining is temporary, just an artifact of interfaces that haven’t caught up, and that we’ll get better windows into what these models are doing and better ways to steer them midstream. It is also possible that the opposite is true: that the more capable the model, the less there is for a human to meaningfully do, and the black box…
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Anthropic launched their new model, and it's once again looking very, very good. Karpathy : This is a super exciting release - Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. The benchmarks are great and it's SOTA on everything by a margin but I'll add that qualitatively also, this is a major-version-bump-deserving step change forward (imo of the same order as…
When is the last time you hand-designed a design system?
I'll call it, manually building out design systems in month-long efforts is dead. We spent the past 10 years formalizing UI design into design systems. (Sure, we sometimes went beyond UI, into brand, print etc.) That's been great for users. Consistency and quality went up. Design systems were manually built up by designers, often formalized into code, governance processes, you name it. Meanwhile,…
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My first ever blog post was about the ethnography course I was doing.
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I spent an hour with Claude and we now have imported my blogging archive since 2002, and we have a pretty damn good search . It one-shotted all of those.
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Another killer quote from that post: Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But we see perspiration becoming increasingly automated.
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Anthropic posts are always great to read, which is wild if you think about it. Worthwhile on progress : There isn’t full consensus among staff at Anthropic, but many believe that the Claude-written code was still worse in quality than human-written code at Anthropic in late 2025, and is roughly at parity today. We expect it to be better within the year. And this we ran a retrospective analysis,…
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Survey on design & AI right now: Roles are changing (correct) Expectations are changing faster than company policy (interesting) Learning is still happening bottom-up: - designers are figuring this out from each other vs from above (interesting) Ending with: Designers bring something unique to the table: user empathy, taste, an inherent sense of what to build and what not to build, delight, and…