Your physical game library is more than a collection of discs. It holds years of memories and stories worth preserving. Starting next week, XBOX Insiders can unlock a digital entitlement for supported physical games. We’ll start with thousands of titles and add more as we can.

I don’t think much “legacy” (pre-AI) software feels right with AI added to it. iOS, Android and Windows have failed to make compelling AI experiences. Every app baking in a crappy agent just annoys me. I get a better experience asking Codex to use the apps for me.

hot take: this is horrible design looks cool but is very hard to use and understand what is going on. keep the fancy stuff on your landing and follow standard patterns for your actual product.

this afternoon i have a client call who can only meet on microsoft teams. so i create a microsoft teams account. set up a password, billing, 2FA, etc etc. an overly laborious process. then i download their teams desktop app. log in, set up a passkey, re-enter my information to get that set up. finally get to schedule a meeting, but i can't. so i click to see why. it's logged me out. okay, microsoft. so i log back in. but my account has been locked. so i ask its chat bot why. no help, obviously, but it says open up a trouble ticket. okay. so i fill out the trouble ticket form with my information and a description of what happened. again, laborious. then i get an auto-response saying that i can't communicate with the support team because the email address i entered on the support ticket is the same as the email on the account that was locked. microsoft, this is why everyone hates you.

AI was supposed to make design easier. For Strath McKay, it has done the opposite. Strath is the co-founder of Akima Studio, a boutique studio working across websites, digital products and e-commerce. His path into design wasn’t conventional: he left his job as a mechanic, learned through real client projects, moved into product design and crypto, burned out, stepped away, and returned to an industry being rapidly reshaped by AI. In this episode of Beyond the Brief, we talk about why static Figma screens are no longer enough, how client expectations have changed, and why designers increasingly need to build what they design. Strath walks me through how Akima moves between Figma, agents and code, builds complete Shopify experiences, turns meeting transcripts into polished proposals, and creates small purpose-built tools around its own workflow. We also get into taste, craft, AI slop, the pressure to keep up, and why sometimes the best thing a designer can do is put the blinders on, focus on real work and keep shipping. Episode five of Beyond the Brief is live. Watch the full episode here on X. Chapters: 00:00 Cold Open 00:25 Intro 00:37 Meet Strath 01:46 Strath’s Story 09:04 Crypto and Web3 14:18 AI Made Design Harder 19:28 Burnout and Reset 24:40 Starting Akima 27:58 Inside Akima Studio 31:31 The New Design Process 39:38 Designers Need to Build 41:10 Akima’s Proposal Tool 47:24 Purpose-Built Tools 52:46 Agentic Websites 56:11 Advice for Designers 58:17 Wrap-Up Learn more about @StrathDesign and Akima Studio:

A good way to audit your codebase: • a strong orchestrator inventories every subsystem • it sends fresh read-only agents through with a DSA prompt • it validates, dedupes, and ranks I ran this overnight and it found 93 opportunities across 55 subsystems! Audit only.