Brian Lovin - Writing

View post: https://brianlovin.com/writing/grok-bot-first-impressions-kcJun01

View post: https://brianlovin.com/writing/how-im-feeling-about-ai-in-august-2026-O7e1TFS

Two recent examples of giving Claude Code a laboratory to find the optimal path through some tedious engineering problems: I added an email capture feature to Shiori so you can forward newsletters into your library.

I shared this video today on X: why I'm so excited about Notion Workers + Custom Agents.

There are many ways to minmax your computer skills (I have an entire Notion database dedicated to the topic).

I've been a Mac user for almost 20 years (my first MacBook was the 2007 matte black edition—the fingerprints!).

Keeping Claude Code skills and settings in sync across devices is tedious.

Imagine you're a running coach and you have a star athlete on your team.

Also read: Give your agent a stopwatch This is where we are in January 2026: coding agents are only as good as their feedback loop.

I need a faster way to capture ideas into Notion from my phone without having to open the mobile app, navigate to the right database, and type out a bunch of properties.

There’s no shortcut.

The modern team communication toolkit is broken: docs in one app, calls in another, posts and chat in another, and everyone ends up copy-pasting links all over the place and fiddling with permissions to make sure people can see the right things.

Today, on a whim, I went live on YouTube to try Framer Sites and see what all the buzz is about.

Last week I asked Twitter if anyone would pay for visual design critique as a service — I love helping people fix small visual bugs in their designs, but would a business pay for this?

If you're like me, you've found yourself in a situation where you were so excited to pursue a new goal, start a new side project, or explore a new hobby, that you just couldn't wait to tell the world.

My personal website is an over-engineered playground where I can tinker, learn new things, test new tools, break all the rules, and just scratch that itch deep in my brain that wants to understand how the hell web software works.

Typing fast is the one of the highest leverage skills you can develop in tech.

Text message spam is getting out of control.

Last week I shipped a redesign of my personal website, a project that started in September and took nearly two months of working nights and weekends to finish.

Last year I began writing small angel checks in early stage startups and advising founders on product design.

The portfolio presentation is the most important part of a product design interview loop.

Over the years I’ve made dozens of websites, started and ended a handful of side businesses, hosted industry events, interviewed hundreds of people, written blog posts, reviewed apps, and generally used design and code to chip away at problems that I find…

This week I published the 8th and final interview for Staff Design, an interview series exploring how experienced designers navigate the individual contributor career path.

Here are the tips and strategies I've learned from shipping many side projects over the years, including my personal site, Security Checklist, Staff Design and Design Details: You're probably going to work on a side project for a few weeks.

For the past eight weeks I've been working on a new interview project called Staff Design, where I'm learning how successful individual contributors in product design navigate their careers.

Writing a year-in-review post just hits different this time around, huh?

This was the first year in many that I managed to regularly update and publish content on my personal site.

Last week I rebuilt my personal website with Tailwind.css, a CSS framework that uses utility classes to compose interface styles.

Last week Divya Tak asked on Twitter "but what are things that you do to 'save the users from themselves...'"

Last week I tweeted: This response from Hans captured another meaning behind my message: View post: https://brianlovin.com/writing/true-respect-is-the-difference-z6xPQaA

Writing self reviews can be hard.

It was cool to read Michael Knepprath's 2020 Mid-Year Review this week – this year has been breezing by at an uncomfortable pace, so it is helpful to pause for a second and introspect a while.

Quality is subjective and hard to define.

It's enjoyable to iterate on this site, in the spirit of building incrementally correct personal websites.

In the spirit of over-complicating the hell out of my personal website, I spent time this weekend trying to solve one very small and seemingly-simple problem: can I make my statically-generated website know when I am viewing it?

I first heard of the phrase "incremental correctness" from Guillermo Rauch during our Design Details interview over 2 years ago.† Since then, the concept has been weaving its way through all parts of my life, inside and outside of design and technology.

We started building the GitHub mobile apps last May, around the same time that Figma Plugins were released.

Last week I was reading [To Get Good, Go After the Metagame](https://commoncog.com/blog/to-get-good-go-after-the-metagame/), a post about metagames in life, and how understanding metas can create competitive advantages.

I've been maintaining this list of useful and inspiring product design portfolios for a few years.

It's no longer possible to be a "designer unicorn."

I've been privately writing year-in-review journal entries for a few years, but since I'm jump-starting this blog again it seems fun to share more openly here.

While it might not be necessary to work nights and weekends, it does seem practically useful.

Over the last few years I've had many conversations with people who make decent tech salaries, but aren't doing all that much with their money.

I've been using Next.js's API routing feature to implement a thin wrapper around the Simplecast API.

I recently rebuilt most of my personal site with the main goal of providing a better surface area for writing.

I recently added automatic dark mode theming to my personal site using Next.js, styled-components, and useDarkmode.

Google Analytics is overkill for most of my projects.