In Perils of the New Armchair Scholarship Dan Cohen finishes with a summary that hits exactly where I am landing on using AI in design. Emphasis mine:

This is the professorial equivalent of the cognitive decline that we worry about with our students who have been using AI for years — and what atrophies in the seminar room will surely atrophy on the page as well. The solution seems clear: if you would like, use AI for the parts of scholarly work where it excels and check all automated output, while retaining human seniority in orchestrating and expressing the meaning of your research.

For me, as I explore how to use these new tools in my work, this is where I am landing. I do all the design thinking, the layouts, and interactions but the AI does the building. What would take me maybe a week or more to build a prototype to test a design, takes Claude an hour or two, and as a result my work is richer.

Design for me has never stopped in the design software. When I worked for myself as both designer and developer, design would continue as I built. I would move back and forth between Sketch and code, my problem was that sometimes I was aware a better solution was out there, I just couldn’t build it. When I moved to an in-house design team that symbiosis of design and dev was lost. The design software we used to prototype would influence my design thinking, I didn’t always know how to do something, or it would take too long to build so I couldn’t explore it.

In contrast, the workflow now emerging for me is much closer to what it used to be when I was self-employed, the difference now is that I am less constrained by my own technical ability. I am able to push designs further and see how they work in the browser, my work has become both quicker and deeper.

Atlas looks like an interesting app for collecting an inspiration library. Along time ago I used Yojimbo and a now long gone app (whose name escapes me) specifically for collecting screenshots as my inspiration library. I often wondered how I could return to that practice of collecting things for inspiration, perhaps this might be it.

An interesting piece from Om about Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and their Mythos model. It is a thought provoking look at the actions of Dario and the meaning of the name and it’s etymology. I recently switched from using Claude/Cowork/Code to OpenAI’s Codex/ChatGPT after reading a number of posts from Manton that made me look at OpenAI from a different angle.

I'm slowly building out a new "professional" site which will become a portfolio and possibly have some kind of design based blog. You can find it here.

This is the best take I’ve read on the Ferrari Luce.

There are bloggers who I admire a great deal. I have been reading or following them in some form for years. They manage to post interesting things day after day, their posts are well written and thoughtful. They are the ones who, in my mind, make blogging cool.

They inspire me.

When I read their posts, they make me want to post. They make me want to write. They make me wish I had interesting things to share. Yet, there is a barrier I create for myself. I don’t feel like I can do it. My days are full of my day job, I do a lot of thinking in the day, but it is specific to the work. I would share some of it if I could, but I can’t because what I’m starting work on now won’t be visible to the public until 2028 at the earliest.

How I get around this is a constant challenge that I do not know an answer to at the moment. It is frustrating.

It’s roughly two weeks since I got my first new personal Mac since 2015 and I’ve yet to comment on it. In short it’s an incredible machine. The upgrade is well worth it and I wish I had made the jump a little sooner. I am working on a piece to speak to all the differences I’m noticing but for now I wanted to say this. The battery is insane. I’ve a work issued M1 Pro MacBook Pro and the battery on that is impressive, the battery on this M5 Air blows it away. I’ve done everything on this little laptop since it arrived, from coding, to design work, to life admin, to watching videos, you name it I’ve probably done it, but I’ve only had to charge the thing once since it’s initial iCloud sync. Incredible.

I’ve several people linking to this piece by Sam Henri Gold for the same reason I am. It resonates with them.

I got my first Mac in 2004, I was 19 turning 20, and about to head off to uni. I was a slightly older version of this quote:

Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.

He has decided he’ll be fine.

Previously I’d been using the family PC, I’d done homework on it, I’d played Championship Manager and Civilisation on it, I’d used MSN Messenger to chat to my friends, and I’d downloaded music. Then my Dad said since I was going to study graphic design I should get a Mac since that was the industry standard. The only Mac I could afford was a white plastic G4 iBook, I got the 14 inch because a bigger screen is better but hadn’t realised it was the same resolution as the 12 inch.

I got that Mac in the August before I headed off to uni. It was the first computer I realised could be fun to use. My uncle gave me some copies of Adobe CS2 that he had got through work (he was a policeman and I’ll leave it at that) and I realised I could create stuff on it. I never looked back. A year later I bought an Intel Core Duo iMac because I’d hit the limits of my iBook.

The Neo reminds me of that iBook. It’s got compromises but it’s the first Mac I’ve seen in ages that made me smile. It’s the one I’m thinking to replace my 2015 MacBook Pro with. I know the Air is probably better for me, but it’s twice as expensive and I have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro (that’s a lot of Pro’s) from work. I know I want one, and it’s the first piece of technology that I’ve said that about in a long time.

This Mac could be many things for a lot of people. To many it will be an obsession. To others it will be an enabler. To some it will be an inspiration. To most it will be all three, just like that first iBook was to me.