What are the best articles about interesting AI design pattern

If I had to pick one starting point, it'd be my write-up of the talk on durable patterns in AI product design. It walks through how AI products evolved from working behind the scenes, to direct interaction with models, to agentic systems, and covers recurring problems like capability awareness, context awareness, and "walls of text". The solutions include suggested questions, citations, multimedia responses, prompt enhancement, visual task builders, and AI onboarding. The idea is to spot the patterns that keep proving their value as models change.

For chat specifically, two pieces dig into layout problems. An Alternative Chat UI Layout looks at what happens when chat gets agentic. Instead of "you ask, the AI responds," you get thinking, a tool call, commentary on the outcome, another tool call, and so on. An earlier article on scaling conversational interfaces covers shrinking previous messages so the current one gets focus, which is something we do here on Ask LukeW.

If you want a framework for where AI shows up in a product, my notes from Future Product Days lay out a useful spectrum. It runs from open text-box chat (high user burden, since people have to supply all the context), to sidecar experiences, to embedded AI in the flow of work, to background agents that act on their own.

A few newer ones push in different directions. Skip the Tools, Make the Outcomes argues that a tool was always just a means to an end, so if AI can get you to the end directly, why stop at the tool? And Design Systems for AI Agents reframes design systems as part of the AI steering layer: the context that keeps every site update aligned with brand, design, and development guidelines when agents write most of the code.

For a lighter read, An AI Icon Standard for Apps? (from 2023) asks whether the sparkle icon will last, using the floppy disk save icon, which faded away along with the need to save at all, as a cautionary tale.

And if you want to go really deep, I wrote a whole series on designing Ask LukeW, covering streaming citations, inline images, audio and video experiences, preview cards, and a usability study with designers.

Start with the durable patterns piece, then follow whichever problem you're facing right now.