Kyle Shepherd

@ridd_design Reminds me of Cal Newport's book Slow Productivity (and to a lesser degree, Deep Work). If you've never read them, you gotta

one of the better reads I've had this week

@sheherenow_ in light of all the nonsense yesterday I misread this as "at what point do u think Anthropic will ban you from using your Claude Code subscription" and laughed

at what point of the Humanoid Robot hype cycle do u think Anthropic will ban them from using your Claude Code subscription?

@jameygannon Nothing to add, but really helpful to read about the messiness and challenges you've described. Helps me with imposter syndrome big time. Thanks for writing about it.

@krispuckett Would love a live view of building a living essay like you did for Neuma that one time.

Working on a new living-essay concept I'm pretty stoked about: My relationship with the clock, entering the 2nd half of life well, and the daily loop in my brain that I'm running out of time. Should be fun.

@benjitaylor why did u revert the variable font sidebar hover states

@ridd_design "taste-execution gap" is a good way of putting it. I'm doing things now I never would've considered before because I didn't know how to do it

I played with this all night and it's FUN I'm using Claude to generate prompts that give me custom parameters to tweak things like this caustic water effect inside of Jitter's UI Here's the rabbit hole that I went down and what I learned 👇 The first thing I thought of was Eleven Labs' chladni patterns from their updated brand I think they are dope so I asked Claude to suggest some other patterns I could use as a starting point for my own visual system Claude then gave me a list of options with brief descriptions I then said "cool let's make a phyllotaxis animation tool" and it gave me a prompt for Jitter Jitter then turned that prompt into parameters built directly into their UI that I was able to use to control a custom sunflower-seed animation pattern (which I had never heard of until last night lol) that all took like 3 minutes and the output was very cool 🤯 The big unlock for me was realizing I can lean on Claude to help me come up with the specific language needed to get something uniquely beautiful Like when I wanted to explore background effects for Dive I stared by typing "underwater effects" into Jitter It gave me decent results but I struggled to push past it. But then I asked Claude for different types of underwater effects which helped me quickly build a language bank to pull from. In my case "caustics" was the word that I was missing from my vocabulary As soon as I had Claude build a prompt around that I was immediately able to get much more interesting results that I could tweak and play with The ceiling for creativity here is HIGH. And the bar is LOW. I cannot emphasize enough how much I suck at this type of design. And yet I'm making animations and effects that obliterate my previous taste-execution gap

@frank_chimero Very nice. old school mac vibes.

Playing with cover flow style. Looks kind of neat, works like blooby blee-blob.

Spawned an album-focused music app for myself last night with Claude. It’s a progressive web app that reads a local directory for media and creates a grid of album covers. Click to play. No track listings, no search, just right.

@krispuckett I often tend toward serifs for body copy because of my history in typesetting, and I love it, but I have it in my head serifs are bad for body copy on screens. Maybe that is old tho

I’m going to serif all the things.

@jameygannon @getmilana @JCKHLRY it looks like a sugar rush 😍

new work for @getmilana done with @JCKHLRY project breakdown 👇

@krispuckett Oh this is great! I was just looking at Quiver the other day for a simple logo I needed for a side project.

Pretty huge ngl

@karrisaarinen Oh nice. That should make things faster! 🫡

@zoop_design it works with hover today. You can hover, and hit S, and then use the number or your mouse to select the status

@karrisaarinen how big a lift is it to allow changing the status of an issue just when hovering? Currently have to click Status icon then hit 5, be nice to just hover and hit 5 :)

@danmall Also pls launch your new site. I have been waiting forever. A couple of weeks is with Dan Mall as a year and a half, apparently 🕰️

@zoop_design Thanks! They’re a mix of AI, public domain art, my own photography, and some illustrations I commissioned. More info here: danmall.com/posts/a-sneak-…

Here’s my favorite thing to do with Claude lately: Find books I wouldn't normally read. I fed Claude my “Read” list and abandoned books list from the last 12 years. A few things I found interesting: → Claude calls my reading style “the nonfiction strategist,” reading “deliberately, progressively, and for utility.” I “read to build, not to escape or for entertainment.” → My reading evolution mirrored my career timeline. 2014–2016: design and craft. 2017–2022: money, client management, leadership, scaling. 2022–present: entrepreneurship, coaching, wealth, mindset, AI, culture. → I quit books that are “dense and slow-building,” which includes most fiction, Daniel Kahneman, and Brené Brown. → I finish books that are "direct, practical, and fast-moving." I read for "signal density, not depth of argument." → Comics are a consistent thread. I've read the essential Batman canon over the last decade. My reading history isn’t just a record of my taste. It’s a record of my beliefs. And I've been reading the same beliefs back to myself for 12 years. We live in echo chambers: in politics, culture, the feeds we curate, the people we follow. It’s making the world boring and dangerous. Reading is one of the few places we can do something about that. I gave Claude this prompt: “Based on my previous reading habits, give me a list of 10 books that are very different from what I normally read. These books should run counter to my current worldview. But they should also still be able to hold my interest. Consider authors, subjects, and styles that are atypical for me.” My typical authors are overwhelmingly American, male, business-focused, and contemporary. The suggestions pushed in interesting directions: → Against my utilitarian instincts. Books about presence, stillness, and meaning with zero ROI. Like The Miracle of Mindfulness or Siddhartha. → Against my business worldview. Books that argue scale is the wrong goal. Like Small is Beautiful or The Consolations of Philosophy. → Fiction I might actually finish. Like Ender’s Game or The Fifth Season. → Perspectives I’ve never inhabited. Memoirs from people whose lives look nothing like mine. Like Things Fall Apart or My Broken Language. I’m calling it The Quarterly Contrary, four books a year that actively argue against how I currently see the world. I’d love it if you joined me. One book a quarter is a small bet against insularity. My first is Hunger by Roxane Gay, a brutally honest memoir about body, trauma, and desire. Unlike anything I’ve read. I’m 75% through and it’s devastating in all the ways I need right now. Reply with your Quarterly Contrary and tell me why. If you don’t have one yet, run your own reading list through the prompt and share what it surfaces.

@danmall This is just off the chain gorgeous. You totally nailed the "visceral beauty." I was just telling my wife 2 days ago that I need to put flowers on my website but now how can I do that, I will forever live in your shadow as a lesser man. 😂🙏🏻

@msllrs felt cute, don't delete later

too cute?

@sheherenow_ same. I've been hand-keying them for nearly 20 years. I will always defend the lil guys

@zoop_design no i just went to design school and made em dashes my personality when i was 19

the perfect take does not exi—

@brian_lovin @rafahari Listened to it driving along earlier. So good and funny

Everyone should strive to approach design more like @rafahari, this was a lovely listen

@tomjohndesign Peak programming in 2026.

i'm very good at prompting. take notes