Hello!
Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.
What are your 10 most recent articles?
Here are my 10 most recent articles, newest first.
Object-Centric Image Editing in Reve (July 1, 2026): Reve's new image model uses structured layouts instead of text prompts, making objects in an image addressable and editable without regenerating the whole thing.
The AI Steering Layer (June 24, 2026): A context-enforcement mechanism that sits between your tools and codebase to keep AI output aligned with brand, design, and coding guidelines.
Scale Your Superpowers, Not Your Job Titles (June 18, 2026): AI lets specialists scale their expertise instead of diluting it by pretending to be everyone else.
Collaborative Steering (May 18, 2026): A team-created, team-maintained way to guide AI agents toward shared goals instead of disjointed individual outcomes.
Mockups Were Never the Hard Part (May 11, 2026): AI makes mockups trivial, but coherency and intention across a product are still the real challenge.
Design Futures Assembly (May 5, 2026): Senior designers and AI lab leaders got together in San Francisco to talk about how the designer's role is shifting.
Finally, the Handoff is Dead (April 30, 2026): A shared workspace called Intent that lets designers, developers, and everyone else collaborate without traditional handoffs.
Podcast: Agents, Interfaces, and More (April 24, 2026): A conversation with UX Institute on the future of interfaces and the evolving role of designers.
The New Designer/Developer Collaboration (April 15, 2026): A new model for building websites where design and development happen in parallel, no handoff required.
Should Designers "Code"? (April 7, 2026): Why understanding your medium still matters, and how AI coding agents are finally bridging the gap between mockups and production code.
If you notice a theme here, you're not imagining it. Lately I've been pretty obsessed with how AI is reshaping the way designers and developers work together.