Lurking at the intersection of humans, design, & technology.
fUTURE
Joined October 2009
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Dave retweeted
The attention economy weaponized media against our brains. It's not an accident we read less.
Billions were spent to create apps that hijack our brains. It's no accident. Netflix openly said they are competing against sleep (!).
The good news is all of these things have off switches. We can choose to go outside, to pick deep media (movies, books) and talk to other people in person.
Dave retweeted
Making a functioning prototype is intoxicating. And now, anyone can do it. The trap is mistaking our astonishment at what we were able to make for evidence that what we made is good.
We need to be able to throw away and redraw prototypes as quickly as we erase whiteboards, and with the same level of detachment. We must guard against whole teams getting distracted by searching for merit in bad protos just because their makers (often oneself, btw) are dazzled by the magic of what AI can produce.
“Slop grenade” is such a useful term to name this phenomenon.
Lazy work used to mean too little output.
Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else.
@tobi call it "slop grenades."
A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it).
Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess.
You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.
Dave retweeted
The job is to figure out what needs to be made, then work with the team to make it.
That job will never go away, the details will just change.
Don’t get attached to any specific tool or technology, those come and go.
Dave retweeted
I've heard this too many times now. "We cycled through a few different Heads of Product... they never work out."
The pattern looks like this...
1. Founders notice they aren't shipping product.
2. They think a Head of Product will fix it.
3. Head of Product comes in, and spends time/energy at the "strategy" level of framing.
4. The strategy from the Head of Product misses the mark.
5. Founders realize they probably have better ideas about strategy.
6. Founders explain what's important to the Head of Product.
7. Head of Product doesn't have the right skills to translate "this is what we want to solve" to a blueprint of what to specifically build.
In the end, it's a mix of wrong output and no output.
What went wrong here? The #1 mismatch I see is that founders don't know what to expect from the Head of Product, and vice versa.
Founders think they should delegate strategy, which is often not the case.
Heads of Product think they should contribute strategy, which is often not the case.
What's missing is this ... very often Founders have a good nose for what needs to get solved. What they need is someone who can NARROW DOWN and TRANSLATE that into a specific concept with good UX that's technically legible.
But instead what happens is both compete for the "set the strategy" role. And nobody is problems into frames into shapes to go build.
My #1 advice to founders thinking they need a head of product. Ask yourself: do you actually NOT know what you want, strategically? Are you really looking to outsource strategy?
If it's not actually about bringing in someone from outside to set the direction for your whole product ... then you need someone who is skilled ONE LEVEL DOWN in concreteness. Meaning someone who can listen to you about what matters, whiteboard the solution that pulls it all together, and work with technical people to make it happen.
There is a HUGE gap in the market today. We need product people who can work ABOVE the level of Figma-visuals and BELOW the level of "company strategy". So much work of getting to what we actually ship — the blueprint — is in-between.
And let me tell you ... if you EVER go to a product conference, prepare to be deeply misled. There are WAY TOO MANY talks about "strategy" when nobody in the room is truly responsible for strategy.
Product is ultimately about understanding the purpose and translating that into a specific design. A Head of Product who can't whiteboard a UI flow or make technical trade-offs with engineers isn't heading product. They're trying to play CEO.
Dave retweeted
This is what the craziness in the White House is about. Trump’s budget includes:
$1 billion for his White House ballroom.
$1 billion in cuts to the National Park Service.
We should be investing in the needs of the working class, not more of the President's vanity projects.
Dave retweeted
The profit motive will end life on Earth if we let it
BIG MOTHER JONES SCOOP: There are many unresolved health/environmental concerns with glyphosate (a.k.a. Roundup), but the USG keeps letting farmers, companies and public agencies spray it all over—including, as we learned, in America’s forests.
motherjones.com/politics/202…
Dave retweeted
Most confusion about the future of software design stems from a confusion in terminology.
My view: production design will increasingly be automated. The economic logic is self-evident — training machines to mimic and refine existing production practices is cheaper, faster, and more reliable than training humans to do the same.
Strategic design, or “what at are we doing and why,” will look very different. The mediums will broaden: from pencil and paper all the way to automated experiments running in production, iterated on by agents while we sleep.
The inputs and systems we create to find opportunities will reward the most intrepid problem-finders. Design stops being a method of sitting and ruminating on possible forms or solution spaces. Design becomes active, research-based, and built around speed of discovery and expression.
Exploratory design will undergo the greatest shifts. Historically this has been the domain of the artist and the inventor. What existed in the world sprung from the imaginations of people with waking hours to spare and the technical chops to give form to their ideas.
But soon agents will join the mix. Humans and machines alike will generate novel ideas and expressions, building on a vast combinatorial space of possibility. Humans and machines alike will be capable of bringing these forms to market.
The key difference? Humans sleep and have finite, socially agreed upon vocabulary. We may be intuitively suited to know the desires of our fellow man. But machines will have a vaster set of references to draw from, and methods to choose what's most effective in the wild — using taste/selection criteria no human operator alone can summon.
These forces are not mutually exclusive. But they DO operate on a common landscape of global demand—of Desire in the grandest sense.
No matter how much we might wish otherwise, human designers and creatives are not divorced from the logic of desire — nor from unit economics, opportunity costs, or the ever-evolving ways we probe and understand an open-ended set of markets made up of humans and agents alike. Creativity has no bounds. But desire underpins it all.
Design itself will not be recognizable from what exists today. Imagine describing NYC to an ancient cave dweller. Agents today are like the most primitive forms of seafaring trade.
Instead it will be defined by the designers who build new systems and methods for understanding, channeling, and feeding desire in all its forms.
Whether design belongs in Figma or Claude Design is a distraction from a bigger shift.
1️⃣ Design will become autonomous. More helpful to think of it as 𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙸𝙶𝙽.𝚖𝚍, used by your coding agents running your software factory.
2️⃣ Specialized “personal” design tools generated by teams will proliferate. Design is a capability, not a tool. I agree with @rsms that there are many facets of design, and multiple tools are required.
I love prompting in @v0 and it’s become the place where I can channel my inspiration, explore, communicate. But I’m also seeing a new generation of products that use the v0 Platform API or Sandbox and put design on autopilot.
There are next-generation agents like @tryflint and trybloom.ai generating design & brand systems and maintaining them autonomously. Flint can even keep your website and content up to date and its design consistent. No human prompting needed.
From this we will see the emergence of fully autonomous companies with agents like nanocorp.so and durable.ai, which go a step further and grow and advertise your business.
tl:dr; The future looks very different from the present. AI is a true discontinuity. The “here’s the existing thing but with AI and ${jobTitle} is cooked” is short-sighted.
Dave retweeted
Every time you swipe to a new 30-second video, your brain releases a small pulse of dopamine in anticipation of what might come next. This is what neuroscientists call a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, the same mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive form of gambling. The uncertainty does the work. And the feed delivers it 270 times per day.
The average TikTok user consumes 167 to 271 videos per day. Each one is 21 to 34 seconds long. That’s a dopamine pulse every half-minute for hours. Your nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, adapts to that cadence. It recalibrates what “normal stimulation” feels like. When you then sit down with a novel or a crossword puzzle, your brain registers the low stimulation as aversive. You feel restless. You reach for your phone. That restlessness is withdrawal operating below conscious awareness.
The data on this is now stacking up. Average attention span on social media dropped from 12 seconds in 2015 to 8.25 seconds in 2025. Teens toggle between apps every 44 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes a decade ago. 52% of people now skip videos longer than 60 seconds even when they’re interested in the topic.
Here’s the part that changes the conversation. Researchers interrupted participants during a task with either TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube, then asked them to resume. After TikTok, accuracy dropped to barely above random guessing. Twitter and YouTube showed zero measurable impact. The short-form feed format specifically degrades prospective memory, your ability to hold an intention across a time gap.
The prefrontal cortex, which governs sustained attention and impulse control, doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. An entire generation is training that circuitry on rapid context switching 270 times per day. The brain wires to whatever you repeatedly expose it to. Full stop.
Puzzles, board games, long novels, long-form video. These function as something like resistance training for the prefrontal cortex. They require sustained effort without algorithmic reward. That’s the point. The discomfort you feel 10 minutes into a book after a week of heavy scrolling is the same discomfort you feel on rep 8 of a hard set. The adaptation is on the other side of it.
Your brain adapted to the feed. The same plasticity that allowed that works in reverse. But you have to actually put it under load.
Dave retweeted
Someone asked me which AI tools I *actually* use as a designer.
Honest answer: you need a couple of them. One model doesn't give you enough freedom to do anything serious.
Here's what my stack looks like right now:
→ Midjourney for initial style. Nothing comes close, but it misses on details.
→ Nano Banana Pro (such a ridiculous fucking name) for high fidelity, fine-tuning, and final assets.
→ Kling for animation. I really like how it interprets everything between a start and end frame.
→ Claude in the beginning and in-between for planning and iterating on prompts.
→ AI upscalers if something needs polishing.
→ After Effects or DaVinci for effects, like depth of field, noise, or anything I want full control over.
You really need a couple of these to have any real freedom. One model doesn't cut it.
Dave retweeted
Places I go to when I need design inspiration:
Mobbin
Awwwards
Godly
Dribbble
Land-book
Refero
SiteInspire
Lapa Ninja
UX Archive
Screenlane
Behance
Collect UI
Flowbase
Hover States
UI Movement
Framer Gallery
Minimal Gallery
SaaSFrame
Landingfolio
Pttrns
Good UI
Abduzeedo
One Page Love
Waveguide
Designspiration
Best Website Gallery
UI Garage
FigmaCrush
UX Collective
Smashing Magazine
Codrops
Muzli
Boxes and Arrows
Designer News
Dark Mode Design
Web Designer Depot
Designmodo
99designs Discover
GoodUX
Flowstep
Inspiration Grid
Scrnshts
Dave retweeted
you wake up and reach for your phone before your eyes focus. scroll through a hundred thoughts that aren’t yours until your own voice sounds like someone you used to know and by noon you’ve consumed more information than your grandparents did in a year but can’t name a single thing that actually moved you. the feed keeps serving up other people’s lives and you keep swallowing them whole, mistaking the fullness for satisfaction when really you’re just bloated on nothing. you’ve become a processing unit instead of a person and the loneliest part is how normal it feels.
Dave retweeted
Thoughts:
1. In the future, the probability something is generated entirely by AI will be inversely proportional to its intended lifespan.
2. For conceptually simple artifacts that are intended to have short lifespans, humans will still be involved just at a different level of abstraction. For example, I'm super excited about @Weavy_ai (Figma Weave) because it shows what's possible when you treat AI generation like clay to shape rather than the final output. Workflow building is a new skill to explore and learn.
3. If you intend for an artifact to have a long lifespan (ex: software, a novel, a movie), then AI might still aid you in your creative process. But you will bring great intention to the work. You will think through many different approaches. You will care about the smallest of details. You will lean into the craft. Because if you don't, it won't be good enough to last. It won't be noticed. It won't be loved. It won't matter.
4. Focusing just on software now... people don't like it when software changes. Everyone who has shipped a redesign knows this! So you might be generating new content within a piece of software frequently but of course you wouldn't redesign the fundamental UX of the software all the time. Users would hate it.
As a grounding metaphor, consider a house. Yes, you might change the photos and papers and magnets stuck to your fridge a few times a week. Once in a while, you reorganize stuff or move furniture around. After living in the house for a while, you maybe notice issues around how you use the space and — with great intention — embark on a remodel.
Some parts of the house, like the fridge, change a lot. But the overall structure of the house changes less. When asking what will be generated by AI, don't confuse the whole for the parts, the long lasting for the ephemeral.
5. It's intellectually interesting to think about whether a brand might want to adapt their software on a user by user basis. (Certainly individuals will be able to make more software for themselves if they are so inclined. For example, see Figma Make.)
That said, my strong gut right now is that we will not end up in a world where brands customize software on a per user basis.
People learn how to use software from other humans. Snapchat is a great example. For a new user, Snapchat is kind of confusing. You can see this as a design issue or an advantage... I argue it's an advantage.
By leaning into custom patterns and a learnable (but arguably non-intuitive) interface, the resulting network is a more intentional space. If you're young, you'll learn how to use Snapchat by watching your friends use Snapchat. And if you're older, well, you might not be the intended demographic.
6. To wrap up... we are in a world where the amount of software is growing at an exponential rate. If you want to win, design is the differentiator. Invest in design, craft, storytelling and a bold point of view.
Use AI as a tool, but don't expect it to build the next big thing for you on its own. Don't expect it to make something that no one has ever seen or imagined before. That's your job.
Dave retweeted
Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential novelists alive today. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a National Book Award winner, and this conversation is all about how he writes his books.
For him, great writing begins with great characters. And developing great characters begins with ruthless self-examination.
Franzen has always had an outsider’s eye. He questioned the hype of modern technology long before it was fashionable to do so, and he’s diagnosed the spiritual emptiness of modern consumerism as well as anybody alive today.
Timestamps:
00:00 Creating rich characters
02:40 Should novels be funny?
12:01 Examining your own life
14:49 Why novels must be fun
25:15 How clichés ruin fiction
29:16 How to observe society
43:28 The dangers of modern tech
49:22 Lies about “the good life”
52:38 Does chaos make you creative?
54:49 Jonathan’s writing routine
59:37 Why he loves birds
If you want to watch it elsewhere, look up “David Perell” or “How I Write” on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Dave retweeted
Word doesn't make you a Writer. And Figma doesn't make you a Designer.
And also: everyone working on software should care about design. We should welcome more input in the design process and encourage non-designers to improve their skills / taste.
Dave retweeted
Taking phones off the internet boosts mental health.
People were randomly assigned to block mobile internet for 2 weeks. They socialized, exercised, and read more—and became happier, less depressed & anxious, and more focused.
Being unglued from devices is good for well-being.
Dave retweeted
Being a great designer is one thing. Being a great designer, while navigating structures and processes of a major corporation, and actually getting stuff built? That’s a whole different game.
Dave retweeted
one famous photographer I know once confided, “it’s really just taking a shit load of photographs and then picking the best one.” Reminded me that quality is often a function of quantity of options, time and tools for creation, and taste.
