The five best design links, every weekday

Wednesday09/30

1

chrbutler.com

AI is a boring technology

Is AI as interesting as what it helps you do? I don’t think it is, and I mean that as a compliment.

2

vincent.bernat.ch

Sidenotes with CSS anchor positioning

Sidenotes positioned in the margin with CSS anchor positioning, without JavaScript. On narrow viewports and older browsers, they fall back below...

3

hacker-simulator.com

Online hacker simulator

This interactive online hacker app will let you simulate that you’re hacking a computer or a digital network.

4

vgpu.sh

The WebGPU library, designed for agents

Fullscreen shaders, compute pipelines, raw WebGPU interop, and read-only source files compiled directly by this docs app.

5

discourse.haskell.org

How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account?

The Sidebar Newsletter

5 Design Links in Your Inbox Every Weekday

Tuesday09/29

1

hipuku.dev

The default is not a design decision

How the design industry built the infrastructure of sameness, and called it best practice.

2

aymannadeem.com

Plan mode is dead

Earlier this year, I believed planning was going to become the most important part of building software with AI.

3

rudyfaile.com

The age of the soft skill

The engineer who missed meetings, answered Slack when they felt like it, and audibly sighed when you asked them to write something down.

4

anas-sabbar.ca

What your phone is made of

The mined materials in a mobile phone, and which countries produced each of them in 2025, from U.S. Geological Survey data.

5

youtube.com

How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with Al

As AI makes it easier to build, how do we keep products from becoming generic “zombie UI”?

Monday09/28

1

bit.ly

Productivity for people with back to back meetingsSponsored

You know that feeling when you leave a meeting and immediately forget half of what you agreed to?

2

flaviocopes.com

12 CSS features you can use today with no build step

Modern CSS features that replace Sass, PostCSS plugins and JavaScript hacks.

3

chriscoyier.net

The four tiers of tab importance

Arc is the greatest web browser ever, and has been tragically moved-on-from by The Browser Company of New York-come-Atlassian.

4

codewithbeto.dev

Is your app ready for iPhone Duo?

Rebuild with Xcode 27.1, then let size, Split View, the fold, and system controls decide how your app uses the extra space on iPhone Duo.

5

davekiss.com

A eulogy for the software engineer

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to bury the software engineer.

Friday09/25

1

michaelheap.com

I don’t want the details

Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.

2

realworth.io

Anatomy of a $100 bill

A 3D tour of the U.S. $100 bill, plus 15 design and security feature groups explained.

3

walzr.com

IMG_0001

A bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of raw, unedited videos.

4

lukew.com

Skip the tools, make the outcomes

The pervasiveness of tools may have implanted the wrong instinct in our heads in a world of AI.

5

cannoneyed.com

Isometric NYC

A giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City. And an excuse to push hard on the limits of the latest and greatest coding agents.

Thursday09/24

1

voiceinthemachine.com

The fear of AI

When numbers do not match the fear, and where fear should be aimed.

2

paulbakaus.com

I gave my website a boss fight

Building a little piece of it involved Claude, 4,096 colors, and a surprisingly difficult pair of legs.

3

categorycolors.com

Category colors

A browser-based optimizer for categorical color palettes.

4

loading.dev

loading.dev

A lightweight library full of beautiful loading indicators for React.

5

tonyward.dev

Code as the source of truth

With AI tooling, code being the source of truth just makes sense.

Wednesday09/23

1

blog.exe.dev

Caring vs. knowing

Thoughts on how to DIY sustainably.

2

petdex.dev

Petdex

Open-source animated pets for coding agents. Browse pets, preview their animations, and install one with a single command.

3

nngroup.com

The 3 roles of context for AI agents

AI-agent power users curate 3 kinds of context: global (across tasks), local (task-specific), and ambient (raw streams like email).

4

imagetoascii.art

Image to ASCII converter

Convert images to ASCII art locally in your browser. No upload, no signup. Copy ASCII or export TXT, PNG, SVG, and Markdown.

5

addyosmani.com

Audit your agent files

A practical guide to auditing what your coding agent still needs.

Tuesday09/22

1

borischerny.com

I am often wrong

Six steps for pretty much every problem, and pretty much every product.

2

er-certification.statichost.page

The Enshittification Resistant Software

A self certification process with a somewhat official blessing.

3

anthropic.com

Scenarios for our economic future

The Anthropic Economics Team models the effects of AI on the economy of 2030.

4

twilson.net

Filling in the last row of a responsive grid

Filler cells for CSS grids with borders.

5

naturalgeneralintelligence.ai

Natural General Intelligence

The case for a nature model that learns the state and dynamics of the planet itself.

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