Ryan James

The Stanford AI Index is 400 pages long and it was outdated before it was published. That's the reality we're working in now. I wrote about the pace, the fatigue, and how I'm trying to stay informed without drowning. ryanrjames.substack.com

Employment for developers under 25 has dropped nearly 20% since 2022. For those over 30, it held steady or grew. The industry demands senior engineers while automating the junior work that produces them. But there's a new kind of engineering emerging, and it's open to everyone. New in Dispatches on AI: "Who Needs an Engineer" ryanrjames.substack.com/p/who-needs-an…

You can generate a brand kit in two minutes. But you can't generate the experience of having designed one. The work might look similar, but the designer who made it won't be. New in Dispatches on AI: "The New Craft Gap" ryanrjames.substack.com/p/the-new-craf…

AI-generated war footage viewed by millions before anyone flags it. 2,000+ fake news sites in search results. A major publisher duped by an AI-written novel. The web has a trust problem. I wrote about what we build next. ryanrjames.substack.com/p/the-ai-fuele…

I've spent 20+ years designing and building things on the web. Right now the entire foundation of that work is shifting, and it's moving faster than any of us expected. I started writing about it. Introductory entry, Exploring AI's Impact on Digital Creation: open.substack.com/pub/ryanrjames…

Perhaps the greatest indicator of a person’s capacity to grow is the willingness to set their ego aside enough to accept the possibility that they are wrong.

This past year, @ryanrjames and I worked together to partner with ambitious founders across all design needs––brand, product and everything in between. We've been lucky to work with teams like @valinortech, @BioRender, friends like @nwilliams030 and many more stealth/YC teams!

Loyalty to tribe is far more potent than rationality of thought.

It seems that current activist movements of all persuasions have to turn off elements of reality to be sustainable.

The undeniable reality is that all of us are going to be wrong about a lot of things in our lifetimes. That makes kindness, grace and humility all the more important to grow in.

No movement is immune to unhealthy extremes.

Teach your children how to think, not what to think.

Nearly everything awesome takes longer than you think. Get started and don't worry about the clock.

Reflecting on how much the iPhone when it was first introduced (and its elimination of tactile buttons) really, truly, revolutionized human-computer interaction forever.

I really miss the pre-stories days of Instagram where it was filled with my friends’ creations or special life moments, not reposts of sideline activist rage.

In my experience, brand color is exponentially more difficult than logo form. Anyone have a good framework for making brand color decisions more objective?

@DanKoch I think the hole in the ozone is going to make a comeback.

There may not be a way to accurately measure this, but I’m wondering what year will mark the turn where the primary moral issue for the left goes from racial inequity to climate change. 2030 over/under? 2040?