Simon

ascii fluid. in threejs / tsl / webgpu

when software had a soul there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive. the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine. software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive. the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different. nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making. somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth. A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing. now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off. and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman. now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero. which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch. when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void. this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out. here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point. AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence. the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice. if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it. that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

🚨SOMEONE REINVENTED HOW TEXT RENDERS ON THE WEB AND ITS ABSOLUTELY INSANE. the goated dev behind react, reasonML, and midjourney’s frontend, just dropped Pretext. a tiny typescript library that measures and lays out text 500x faster than the DOM. he trained models against real browser rendering for weeks until the output matched safari, chrome, and firefox exactly. the demos are insane!! hundreds of thousands of text boxes at 120fps. magazine layouts and chat bubbles that actually wrap right. engineers from Vercel, Remix, Figma, and shadcn all cosigned. this is the kind of open source that makes you want to be a better dev. here are some cool demos in the past 24hrs👇

recreated the gale day hero section with @threejs @WebGPU @greensock named it as a beyond the visible 🌸

Great article! One of many ways we use AI at Joyce 👇 x.com/ayushsoni_io/s…

Made Terrain Procedural and added some clouds @bruno_simon @threejs @threejsJourney

This is another level of wholesomeness

My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces): I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept): Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow

It's finally here! My new portfolio is available now. Made with @tresjs_dev and @nuxt_js as result of my study of @threejs shaders over the last couple of years. The home page contains 3 different variations, can you find them all? More about the project on thread 👇 (01/04)

"the first design agent with taste" the taste:

You can still instantly tell when an app lacks the human touch. I can't commit my time to something if I see that the creator is not willing to commit theirs.

Made this interaction of Linear’s dithered logo for our latest release. It’s using canvas with a lot of tiny dots. There’s an invisible circle around the cursor. Any dot inside it gets pushed outward with a cubic falloff so it’s gentle on the edges, and strong at the center.

as agents make it easy to add features, design matters more, not less. the role is no longer just pushing pixels – it’s deciding what should exist, how it fits together, how humans stay in control, and how intelligence feels clear, trustworthy, and useful. taste, craft, and judgment have always been the bottleneck. the game is not who ships fastest, but who makes the right thing for humans.

design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment but the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest

@bengold It’s far better than Google Chat or Teams imo. I agree, work communication apps need a much better user experience though

I really hate Slack. Die a good alternative actually exist?

Gaussian splatting as part of the UI – a lot went into making this as performant as possible – for example, for the frosting effect I track the card in screen-space and only render to and sample the pixels touched by the blur

This was a fun one too – a loading animation showing a 3D model forming through multiple waves for Luma

@aydaoz @X So true. I miss having a platform where you can just post great work and get recognition.

Nothing works on @X posting work use to be seen, but its sucks now. I upgraded to higher tier of my subscription but zero changes. I shitpost that gets more attention. Im kinda tired and unmotivated cuz of the freaking impression game.

@adriankuleszo @designme dope logotype

Final branding for hint ➿ They wanted something fresh and full of energy. This is what we came back with. Love how the brand turned out!

@lil_dill Definitely looks like a glitch. Pretty annoying tbh.

Fellow detail enthusiasts, what’s your take on the this ‘glass’ text treatment? Whenever I send a text, it feels like there are jagged edges above and below—and I can’t unsee it. 😬