The five best design links, every weekday

Wednesday11/11

1

johnnunemaker.com

Don’t make a human do what AI is amazing at

How Nunebot makes my apps a little better every day without me doing the tedious parts.

2

1in8b.life

1 in 8 billion

Become one of the babies being born right now and live their whole life inside the real statistics of 172 countries and territories.

3

zwischenzugs.com

A family tree of software job titles

If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time you’ll have seen titles come and go, and you might have wondered where they all came from.

4

anthropic.com

The components of agent memory

For Claude to learn from experience, it has to decide what’s worth remembering before it knows what’s next.

5

karolinaszczur.com

There’s no better name for design systems

How to talk about design systems across functions.

The Sidebar Newsletter

5 Design Links in Your Inbox Every Weekday

Tuesday11/10

1

shawnsmucker.substack.com

Please use AI

Be sure to use AI when making.

2

tk.xyz

TK

A new way to write from Medium. The more you write, the better it gets.

3

blossom-carousel.com

Blossom carousel

Enhance native scrolling with dragging instead of replacing it.

4

davesresearch.com

What product strategy does

On maintaining and rebuilding critical relationships.

5

customerorproduct.org

Customer or product?

Sort the apps your family uses and see the price you can’t see.

Monday11/09

1

bit.ly

Vote in Readymag Websites of the Year 2026Sponsored

The award spotlights inventive projects made with Readymag, a design tool for creating outstanding websites. Explore the shortlist and vote.

2

uxdesign.cc

Otherwise you’re just a machine

AI is getting better at design. Designers should too.

3

seanvoisen.com

What does design system AI readiness mean, anyway?

Maybe it’s less about machine-legible artifacts and more about where humans stay in the loop.

4

edge-aura.js.org

edge-aura

An organic glow that hugs the edge of your screen. Zero-dependency Canvas 2D engine with a thin React adapter.

5

ishadeed.com

Site Seeing

See how a web page will behave in different contexts that force unusual viewport sizes.

Friday11/06

1

uxdesign.cc

Everyone is building AI agents. Who’s designing the stop button?

Here’s why the hardest design decisions happen where that autonomy ends.

2

the-brandidentity.com

A sans serif built on oversized round shapes

Superior Type’s Heaven is a brutalist grotesque built on round shapes that are too big for their space.

3

george.mand.is

Tokenizer Mono

A monospace font that highlights LLM tokens as you type. No JavaScript, just OpenType substitution rules and a color table.

4

longnow.org

Attention is all you need

A report from the future on AI, attention, and the maintenance of civilization

5

aframe.io

A-Frame

A web framework for building virtual reality experiences. Make WebVR with HTML and Entity-Component. Works on Vive, Rift, desktop, mobile.

Thursday11/05

1

lesswrong.com

Great but painful

If you want to build a product that people will use, find something that people already do and make it less painful.

2

mean.app

Mean

Visual handoff for humans and agents. Freeze or record your screen, annotate with gestures, and hand the finished session to a human or AI.

3

iamnoman.com

Designing a skill

Skills are becoming the apps of the agentic era. What you learn shipping quality software still applies to them.

4

koto.com

Nubank: Rebrand

Brand redesign and digital foundations built to fight complexity and empower people, with a system that stays unmistakably Nu.

5

vitalik.eth.limo

Digital minimalism

Being intentional about ways that you access digital technology, making each use a conscious choice.

Wednesday11/04

1

buzzusborne.com

Pick three

Exploring the hidden cost of producing good, fast and cheap creative work.

2

avantgarde.110west40th.com

Avant Garde

A seminal, but somewhat overlooked by a wider public, magazine, which broke taboos, rattled some nerves and made a few enemies.

3

uxdesign.cc

Building an AI-ready design system library

Why my design system starts in code, and how I build, check and maintain the Figma library.

4

baselinedesign.com

The window with no buttons

Why the terminal feels so unfamiliar to designers, and how to read it anyway.

5

paper.design

Paper Mono

A beautiful monospace font family with 8 variable weights and coding ligatures, free and open source.

Tuesday11/03

1

royfish.dev

Fingerprints are the new cookies

How browser fingerprinting replaces third-party cookies for persistent user tracking. And to the highest bidder it goes.

2

jelly-ui.com

Jelly UI

A dependency-free Web Components library for tactile product interfaces: soft-body physics, real form controls, dark mode, RTL and WCAG.

3

chrbutler.com

There will always be someone faster, cheaper, and better

AI has designers questioning everything. But the three things we think we’re chosen for haven’t changed at all.

4

github.com

Desigma

Free Figma alternative made on Rust. An independent, local-first, open-source design tool.

5

seldo.com

How to hire junior engineers in the age of AI

Junior developer hiring has collapsed because nobody knows how to interview for the new AI-assisted job.

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