The five best design links, every weekday

Wednesday08/05

1

yeseniaperezcruz.substack.com

The plateau of sad gray icons

Everyone wants to teach AI agents good taste. I just want them to stop filling every surface with icons in soft gray containers.

2

yummy-design-sprint.notion.site

Notion: design & AI workflows

Build and orchestrate agents right alongside your team’s projects, meetings, and connected apps.

3

stackoverflow.blog

Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time.

4

ditherit.com

Dither it

Free online image dithering tool. Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Bayer ordered dithering, animated GIFs, and multi-image upload.

5

bjorg.bjornroche.com

The AI productivity gap

Why the productivity gains from AI are still small.

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Tuesday08/04

1

uxdesign.cc

Designing for the proxy

Why AI is changing who reads first.

2

anthropeum.com

Anthropeum

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Guess where and when each artifact was made.

3

spectrum.ieee.org

The computer that helped win World War II

How Colossus cracked Germany’s encrypted communications.

4

misery.co

ShaderPad

A lightweight, dependency-free library that reduces boilerplate when working with fragment shaders.

5

dylancastillo.co

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?

Generating 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.

Monday08/03

1

go.granola.ai

The AI Notepad for back-to-back meetingsSponsored

Notes, actions and memory. Without a meeting bot. Give it a try on your next meeting.

2

nngroup.com

No new name has replaced “UX”

A survey of 604 tech and design professionals found that “UX” remains the default name for our field, while alternative names remain fragmented.

3

simone.computer

Web desktops

The web's biggest hand curated directory of apps and experiments that simulate desktop operating systems.

4

killthecookiebanner.eu

Kill the cookie banner

Tired of misleading cookie banners? The EU Commission has finally proposed a solution.

5

nytimes.com

Google is building an AI fence around the web it once championed

As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

Friday07/31

1

blog.jim-nielsen.com

The AI aesthetic

How generative tool interfaces introduce specific visual idioms.

2

pcjs.org

PCjs Machines

A variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications.

3

survey.devographics.com

State of Devs 2026

Take the survey and help map all the aspects of a developer's life that are not code, especially as AI starts disrupting the very nature of our jobs.

4

workersdecide.tech

AI Bingo Card Generator

Generate printable bingo cards for your workplace AI implementation exercise.

5

cassidoo.co

A simple clustering algorithm for lists

I nerd-sniped myself deeply when sorting baby toys and came up with a fun pattern for doing so.

Thursday07/30

1

seangoedecke.com

You don’t have to be smart if you can think clearly

Why structured deduction stabilizes engineering performance under complex constraints.

2

originkit.dev

Originkit

A free animated component library for building modern websites. Copy code, use in Framer, or connect through MCP.

3

0xkato.xyz

How to research technical topics with AI

How I go from a technical question I cannot answer to an explanation I can reconstruct without the model.

4

hudsandguis.com

Jurassic World Rebirth UI

A collection of interfaces that help sell the plausibility of this fictional world.

5

agenticeconomytreatise.com

The Agentic Economy

Explore the argument that intelligence and the economy are converging into a single new system.

Wednesday07/29

1

uxdesign.cc

Information architecture is the foundation AI is starving for

Every AI problem you chase (hallucinations, wrong answers, poor retrieval) traces back to the IA projects you never funded.

2

compactmag.com

How podcasts ruined America

How the conversational nature of podcasts replaces journalistic scrutiny with unvetted speculation, altering accountability standards.

3

philschmid.de

Evaluating agents beyond the first prompt

Single-turn scores overstate reliability—regressions, not missing features, are the real bottleneck.

4

jstools.space

How to design URLs

Design readable, stable URLs and choose correctly between route paths, query parameters, and fragments in modern web applications.

5

adamhjk.com

A practical guide to reducing token spend

Building a Swamp Workflow reduced real world token usage of an AI Agent by 8x and improved execution time by 2x.

Tuesday07/28

1

pydantic.dev

The human-in-the-loop is tired

On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself.

2

larp.website

LARP: Revenue infrastructure for serious founders

Send them $10,000. They send you $10,000. You’ve both booked $10,000 in revenue. Cash never moves. Everybody’s a rocketship.

3

tryai.dev

Drawing the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok

Four frontier models, a blank canvas, and colored pencils. We tracked every stroke, dollar, and output as they tried to draw the Mona Lisa.

4

ciggies.app

Chinese Cigarette Museum

An archive of Chinese cigarettes — 3,200+ SKUs across 200+ brands with pack imagery and graphic design history.

5

rauno.me

Rauno Freiberg's field note #2

How grid density, context menus, and custom widgets alter information architecture.

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