@pzayap kept switching between tutorials and his work, so he built shy window it floats a website over your workspace and disappears when you need to see behind it. can see myself using this with documentation open all day

@PhilHedayatnia showed meld, which saves design references along with the fonts, colours and why you liked them that context can go to an ai agent. he also demoed a voice agent for user research, with the designer deciding which feedback matters

@FiachraRM made chengyu calendar, a chinese idiom a day on a little tear-off calendar you can tear the pages, flip through old ones and read where each idiom came from. even the paper edges look affected by humidity. the details are so good

I’m really trying to pretend this is true so RC doesn’t get steamrolled, but the more I think about it, the less I buy it. 1. Historically, the production of many types of goods have decreased dramatically in complexity and it didn’t transition to everyone just building it themselves. When electric tools were invented, did everyone transition to making their own furniture? Did the word processor end the book industry? Did the camera end the art industry? None of these quite match what we’re seeing but I haven’t found a case where humans have de-specialized. 2. Most consumers are exactly that, consumers. They are much lower agency than your average software person, probably lower creativity, and aren’t going to start building their own novel solutions to problems all of a sudden. Perhaps the models get so good they can do it somewhat transparently, but that would still require dictating requirements to the models, which itself is not something most consumers will be great at. And part of making “good” software is being opinionated. Models, due to the efforts of alignment, are limited in what they can say no to. The user asks for something that makes the software worse? “You’re absolutely right!” I’m not sure that taste and alignment are fully compatible. 3. Nothing ever happens. I think software will evolve, and what was a successful app three years ago will be very different three years from now, but it just doesn’t seem likely that after 10,000 years of increasing specialization and craftsmanship, humans will just resort to self reliance all of sudden. We want the expert opinion of other humans. We are interested in novel tools and experiences. Software products often bring with them community and identity that won’t go away. I just think an amplified version of the current trajectory more plausible than a complete reversal. Tell me why I’m wrong!

“Glass is out, stone is in.” Well, now you can use it. I turned the stone UI concepts into Strata UI, a reusable HTML/CSS framework. Textured stone, carved buttons, recessed fields and light and dark themes, with copyable code for your own projects. Thanks to everyone who jumped in with ideas, feedback and a few good laughs. You gave me a reason to keep building. Free under the MIT license. Download the first preview: