Roger Wong - Design, UX, AI, Technology

It took Marek Minor about a year to redraw Cursor’s icon system: more than 600 icons in two sizes and two styles, with every exploration and final variant drawn by hand.

Brett Queener, a partner at Bonfire Ventures, uses “harness” at the scale of an entire product in his newsletter Tales from The Bonfire: The Horse is the LLM model: enormously powerful, fundamentally unpredictable, not something you command so much as rid…

Patrick Morgan, writing in his newsletter Unknown Arts, starts with the boundary his system is designed around: The problem is that prototype code and production code serve fundamentally different purposes.

A harness is the environment around agentic work: the models, instructions, skills, tools, and files that let agents do the job.

Scott Fryxell, writing on his blog, has built his workday around a harness: a shared setup for instructions, tools, files, and scripts that he can use from Cursor, Claude, or the Pi coding agent.

In this past weekend's newsletter “Software for Someone,” I argued that cheap code makes tiny, personal tools viable even when they never become businesses.

Software developer raf, who learned the craft by building and breaking web applications, describes a new apprenticeship problem that starts with an apparent success: a beginner can generate competent work on day one.

Yep!

Adam Waxman built five personal tools using his household’s rules and data from several apps.

I’ve always been more interested in making something than selling it.

Joost de Valk, creator of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, has a better architectural answer to separate sites for agents: maintain one site with several interfaces.

Arin Bhowmick, SAP’s chief design officer, shifts the software-death debate from apps to operating context.

I’ve started asking Claude Design for multiple directions on a canvas, then sending the promising ones through another pass before I choose.

Product designer and educator Aliena Cai argues that AI is changing the work, but isn't replacing one kind of product designer with another.

Podcaster Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Ian Silber, OpenAI's head of product design.

In an interview with Ryan Mather, Federico Villa, and Robin Chen, OpenAI product designer Benjamin Zweig explains why designing memory for ChatGPT required studying how people remember.

Organizations often miss work their metrics were not built to see.

Service designer Daniel T Santos uses British cybernetician Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model to explain why strategic design work can disappear in plain sight: System 1 is operations: these are the units that produce the countable output.

Jem Gold's encounter-language—describing how a design should feel rather than what it is made of—puts the intended experience into words.

Have you ever walked into a fast food restaurant lit with overhead fluorescent lights and knew immediately that it might be a bad idea?