Will Newton

As a designer, I've designed with code almost every single day this past year, across my company & personal projects. In 2024, I only made 84 commits, and much of my work still lived in Figma/Adobe. A lot changed - AI tooling obviously helped. But more than anything, I realized I’ve never had this much fun designing. It has become a hobby rather than just work. I’m learning faster, iterating more, and making design decisions across more layers of abstraction: interface, system, interaction, infrastructure. Designing with code is not for everyone. It's just a part of the modern toolkit - and Figma, Adobe, and many other tools are still there to help. But for me, it has made design feel fluid again, and brought back the same spark I felt when learning Figma for the first time years ago: the realization that I can play an active role in shaping real, helpful products. Design is getting exponentially closer to its “magic wand” moment, and I’m all for it.

wdym of course there’s an agent right on the design canvas that’s fluent in Figma and native to the way your team works

Bragging about how much software you’re shipping with AI is like holding down the shutter button and bragging about how many photos you took.

Live from Code with Claude London: we're launching self-hosted sandboxes (public beta) and MCP tunnels (research preview) in Claude Managed Agents. Run agents inside your own perimeter, with your security controls applied by default.

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation). Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI. As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more. 2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire" 3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies. 4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money." I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here. Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success". Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

Not enough people are talking about how much AI is impacting the role of data science. I was chatting with a DS friend, and he said that most of his team's work now is reviewing half-assed AI data analysis from PMs and engineers. And that 50% of the time, that analysis is wrong. The role is becoming less fun.