Devan Flaherty

Some rendering in Spline. I would love to get more fluent in 3D.

What if taste is more akin to harmonic resonance than it is to training one’s eye. Humans are incredible at detecting patterns, so it reasons to say that taste could just be pattern recognition. That’s cool sure. Go Sherlock daddy. But I like to think of it more as “art (the frequency) travels through an empathetic field to reach you (the tuning fork). Certain art is going to cause your soul to vibrate, leading you to feel some kind of way.”

This team has been killing it. Staying true to the loyal fan base and highly opinionated take on their game while experimenting and learning how to go after the more casual player. Definitely inspired to operate at this level.

We need to stop talking about product design in absolutes… there are no rules. Everything is made up. Do what makes sense and feels right.

Time I said something, before the thought rots in my skull. I finally understand how I feel about AI, though that is not quite the right way to begin, because the trouble I am circling is older than AI and will outlast it. The trouble is power, and what we do with it, and what it does to us. Power is not wicked of itself. A fire warms the hearth or consumes the forest, and the fire does not know the difference. The same is true of of every great force we have learned to summon. And yet each time a new force enters the world, we behave as though this time will be different. This time we will master it. Yet every new force we drag into the world has the same two faces - the one we put on the poster and the one we find later, in the rubble. History has a pattern. Always the same one. We pick the thing up, we use it, we make a fortune off it, and then - much too late - somebody notices the children are sick or the river's dead. The factory ground bones into profit for a hundred years before we got round to fishing the kids out. Social media chewed up a generation while we wrote thinkpieces about it. The guardrails come, eventually. They come small and late, once the shape of the thing is set and the damage is done. And we grow dependent. That's the trick. Each turn of the wheel, you need it a little more and you can do a little less without it. We become more reliant and a little less capable. The convenience is sold quickly and cheaply to each of us alone. The cost is paid slowly and quietly, by all of us together. The power has no will. It does not crave anything. The wanting is ours - our greed, our pride, our terror of being left behind in a race no one named and no one ever wins. And I find myself wondering who is running this race. Are they the ones who know how to love? To sit quietly in a moment? To connect? Or have we let the race be set by those who only know how to conquer? There was bloke called Alan Watts who said we have misunderstood the shape of a life. We treat it as a road with a destination. We hurry through our schooling toward our work, through our work toward our retirement, retirement to the grave. Running the whole way and never looking up. Then one morning you're at the end of it and you realize you weren't living. You were arriving. Job done. Coffin ready. Brilliant. Watts said life's more like a song. You don't rush a song. The whole bloody point of a song is the playing of it. The growth is in the doing. Similarly I find the breakthroughs come while one is washing the dishes, the wax-on/wax-off chores, or the moving of rectangles. These are not empty moments. These are where the soul does its quiet work. And we have grown so frightened of empty moments that we have begun to fill them with anything - any tool, any task, any voice that promises to make the minute matter more. We've made every little thing serious. Every new tool a referendum. Every release a judgment. Designers are cooked. Engineers are cooked. Everyone is cooked. Adapt or be obsolete. You can play, but only to work harder. That's the song now, apparently. And underneath it, like a draft under a door, the constant whisper that you're already behind. So I'll ask the obvious. What are we actually gaining? Not what we're being sold. What we're gaining. Are we making better work, or just faster mediocrity? Doing less, or just letting fewer of us do it all? Is this new found power really serving us? We've built a machine and we've started praying to it. That's the truth of it. We talk about it like a god - what it'll bless us with, what it demands of us, who it'll save, who it'll leave for the wolves. We don't just use the thing. We start to kneel. And the machine doesn't care. Doesn't hate us. Doesn't love us. Doesn't care about the river or the soil or the slow patient art of getting good at something. It's indifferent, and we keep bowing anyway, because bowing's easier than thinking. I know this is lofty speech but the reality is there are men in suits who only care about the end of the thing - who measure the worth by how much one can be made to produce, and how quickly. There are gifted people losing work to a tool that didn't exist last quarter. The pressure's real. The teeth are real. I'm not pretending otherwise. I'm just teaching myself to see it for what it is and where I stand. So, there are bits of my craft I won't be handing over. Not because the machine can't do them. Because doing them is what keeps me sharp - what builds the taste, the eye, the ear for when something's off. The slow bits. The dull bits. The bits where the work shapes the worker. Sure, I'll use the tools where they earn it. Tools come and go and the true growth is not in the tool - but the reps. Tools aren't the enemy. They never were. The enemy is the reflex - the grasping, the panicked little hand reaching for the new thing because everyone else is reaching. Ask whether it's changing the outcome. Or whether it's just adding a step, dressing up as progress, and quietly stealing the part where you might have grown. So I'm holding it loose. Using what works. Letting the rest go. Keeping a few corners of my life stubbornly unoptimized, because that's where the good stuff still turns up. The way I work. The way my kids see me work. The hours I refuse to optimize. The skills I keep practicing because they're mine, not because they're efficient. None of that fixes the system and abuse of power. It just means the system doesn't get all of me. It's the recognition of power and those who wield it - but not kneeling to it. At least that's how I'm making sense of this all. Everyday can feel like some new renegotiation of my worth - but finding that what LinkedIn and X considers valuable is often shallow and only benefits the interest of the machine - not the person behind the avatar.

I added a steam + dry sauna routine to my lift days. I feel reborn at the end of each session. I also love feeling like a villain from the shadow realm as he exits his shroud of fog.

I love this idea from @jasonfried "Your only competition is your costs." Keep costs low, keep the team small, make stuff you want to use. You don't need the whole world: “A business is very simple. You got to make more than you spend. If you're making more than you spend, then your competition is your cost. That's what you're really in business against, how much it costs you to stay in business. It's not all the other alternatives that are on the market. You can't control what they're going to put out there, what they're going to price it at, all the things they're going to do. They're going to do what they're going to do. What I can control is how much it costs me to run my business, how much I sell my product for, and as long as I make more than I spend, I get to stay in business. And isn't that what this is all about, staying in business? That's what it's all about because I like this. I want to keep doing this. I can't keep doing it if I don't stay in business. I can't keep doing it if I make less than it costs me to make the things that I make. So I'm always thinking about the only competition I really have on an annual basis is to make sure that we make more as a company than it costs us to run the company. That's my real competition.”

I think you have to give the game the year to role out all their plans. Obviously there is a ton of stuff cooking, and they don’t seem to care about quantity now. They have an opinion and those that get it - are loyal to the vision. The broader audience will come. What we need is to not have Marathon make fear based decisions and let their full vision unfold.

I just flat out do not know what a Marathon pivot would be. Nothing that would help significantly, in any case

You’re telling me aliens be flying across the galaxy and yet they have no drip? They just be roaming the universe naked? Seems suspicious af.

The resulting action of urgency shouldn’t be hurry… but to walk with purpose. Or at least that’s what I told my family as we were catching a connecting flight when another dad heard me. He gave me the dad-nod and began to echo the sentiment to his family. So we get it.

I think at some rate product designers lost the plot. We were meant to be inventors, thinkers, and a bridge between humans and the message or invention. We aren’t meant to merely declutter, simplify, or make things pretty. Designers are meant to make the very thing humans will be working with, in every imaginable way possible. We are not rectangle builders, we are not pixel pushers, we are inventors and builders pushing to communicate to humans or let humans communicate to our inventions.

My wife finally started reading Red Rising. We can be best friends now.

POV you’re my wife cracking the bathroom door open after I’ve texted you “toilet paper”

It’s hard to put it in words but Marathon is truly the most fun I’ve had in a first person multiplayer game in so long. I do believe the extraction wording alone probably sways people away. I truly believe people are missing out on it. There’s nothing else like it

Every week we’re starting work or RND on something bad ass for MPC II. Action Plates, Natural improvements, slow shutter, Fjorden Grip…. We are going to be eating good.

Spicy take: The older, slower path of developing ideas through canvas-based tools, paired with Claude Code for prototyping, is producing more intentional and better creative outcomes than these insanely over-processed AI workflows.

My feed is ai, ufos, and essentially the most god awful news. So glad I came to check in on what my designer friends are up to.

Just another day.

@andy_matuschak Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

You're right, of course, in the general case. I have only a sentence about that objection in the talk, abridged from this longer essay I'll excerpt: "When I complain about the slow pace of interface invention, people often tell me that this is really a problem with the market. Mass consumers will reward easy, familiar interfaces, not weird, novel ones. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Everyone’s following the same boring B2B SaaS playbook. It’s a lucrative and competitive industry now, instead of the deeply nerdy culture it used to be. Who said novel interfaces were a good thing, anyway? I don’t buy it. Or rather: those objections are true, and they do explain why the median user interface is boring. But “future of computing” meetups and human-computer interaction conferences are full of people who don’t care about those forces. There are plenty of people in these scenes yearning to express a novel personal vision, building their own castles in the clouds. It’s just that—with love, as part of that scene—the results are too often underwhelming. I think this is because the scene is wildly overweight on programming, and underweight on design and domain insight."

⭐ New talk! andymatuschak.org/tat Coding agents might help us finally break out of two cages: the app model, which traps computing in one-size-fits-all silos; and programming as a specialization, which has crowded out cultures of imagination and domain insight.

Maybe I’m missing a key point here. But programmers rarely make decisions alone. I’m sure there are plenty of programmers and teams that would have loved to go a different direction, and tried something new. But you have things like: time, cost, risk, etc. Factors that generally haven’t favored the more imaginative idea.

I think an accidental tyranny of programmers has held back invention in user interfaces. I want weird, courageous, idiosyncratic, alien. I share early reports of how coding agents are changing that, and what it might mean for people and institutions inventing interfaces today.

Back in 2010 I ran a jib camera for a Blindside concert. It was truly bad ass. Cemented forever as some of my favorite artists. youtu.be/8MqaAMyMCKk?si…