slightly contrarian opinion that will probably get no likes: with all the well-deserved energy around “vibe coding” as a way of designing, i feel like we’re inadvertently promoting the idea that no one spends time in Figma anymore — or even just in a Notion doc or on paper, thinking through a problem. that all design is now is prompting language models. i don’t think that’s an accurate expression of the truth. not even at the best ai labs, with access to the most advanced model prototypes. personally, AI has very meaningfully improved the way i work. i open cursor every day and learn so much from both the agent and ask mode. i often have tons of tabs of Chat GPT and Claude open with different streams of thought running. even this post was proofed by AI. but a lot of my time is also spent thinking. and thinking takes many forms: it’s words on a page, designs in a Figma frame, prompts in a thread, spoken words in a voice note, and sometimes even just pure thought. good thoughts matter, no matter the shape they take. for anyone watching and learning by example: my hope is that you don’t lose sight of that. it’s not just a tools game. it’s how you think, talk, communicate, visualize, express, motivate others and, yes: prototype and build. be a whole thinker in all the old and new ways we, humans, think. be the whole, not the part. ❤️

ai is a new kind of clay—it doesn’t obey geometry. it reshapes itself when you touch it. "designing ai" isn’t just about making interfaces but about creating environments and conditions where cognition can emerge.

i think about this often— if beauty is a subjective, evolved preference shaped by biology and culture. and if models learn and recognize patterns humans call beautiful via training data. then every time a model is recognizing something as beautiful, it’s effectively expressing the correlation between that something and the patterns it learned as being preferred by humans. models simulate the recognition of beauty through statistical correlations in human-labeled data. every time a model states that something is beautiful, it’s echoing the average of a thousand human voices who once said it was beautiful. that’s wild.

Peter Thiel: If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time. The rupture of the generational compact isn’t limited to student debt, either. I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate. It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”

i’m noticing a growing echo of ayn rand’s thinking in the feed. “who is john galt?”

first we trained it. now it’s training us.

do you even lift, bro? #figma

scrolling through my timeline of notinos here on x. can't help but think to myself that everyone @NotionHQ is such a cracked thinker. what a wild bunch — s-tier in the best way

people of notion — a question: if you use @NotionHQ in the browser what makes you choose it over desktop? seeking to understand reply in thread pls ❤️