Product designer and builder.
Nashville, TN
Joined April 2007
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'... we don't need to gatekeep what "design" is ...' 💯
I want to be snarky so badly.
But instead I'll say - could it possibly be that both sides definition of design is too narrow and myopic for this very wild world we're in.
AND just maybe we don't need to gatekeep what "design" is because some are uncomfortable with a process that doesn't involve a canvas?
Geoff Alday retweeted
A solo dev spent a year writing a Direct3D 12 engine from scratch so the CRT would be physics, not a shader
- You are the King's Surveyor lost far from home
- Map a valley & study what its makers left behind
- Use your torchlight wisely to get home
Game is The King's Surveyor.
Made a desktop toy yesterday. Have a few ideas about where to take this. Curious about other ideas though.
Color me impressed. AI one-shots can be really good with the right context.
This week, I wrapped the design for a new greenfield project. We’re building it with AI-DLC, a development process from AWS that gives structure to how AI fits into the development lifecycle.
Next up: requirements for Inception, the first phase of AI-DLC. I started with a colleague’s template and filled in about half from my own knowledge of the project. Then, in Cursor, I pointed Opus 5.5 (High) at it with this prompt:
“Would like to create a copy of this doc [redacted].md and populate with relevant information from this vision doc [redacted].pdf. I also have the designs for this new product in Figma on this page: [redacted]”
Cue the mechanical whirring sounds I like to imagine. Minutes later, in one shot, the requirements doc was populated accurately.
But it wasn’t magic. I’d spent real time organizing the Figma file, naming every screen by its place in the information architecture, its purpose and state, and its intended user. When every prompt has a price tag, good context isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the cheapest optimization you’ll ever make.
Anyway, the robots are ready when you are. Your “Frame 427 copy 3” might not be.
Discernment in tool choice, is becoming even more important these days.
Spent the past few weeks doing design work for a greenfield project almost exclusively in Figma. Leading up to that, agents helped me synthesize research and brainstorm feature sets. I also used them to help me create a design system (both in Figma and in code).
It's so easy though to get caught up in all the hype. It's exciting and I think most of us love learning new tools and techniques. Remember though, agents are effectively very smart hammers. It's ok to pick an old trusty "dumber" one when it's a better fit for the job. It might just get you there faster too.
Threw together a very rudimentary .art site so I have a place to share random drawings and stuff. I'm a bit rusty but trying to draw something most days.
Everything there is drawn with a Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14 and Clip Studio Paint (thanks years of Amazon reward points).
When I finish a drawing, I upload it to a Google Drive folder and a CRON job on Vercel picks up new files and adds them to the site automatically.
Anywho, it's here if curious: alday.art/
Who has tackled the complicated Venn diagram of DESIGN.md, a shared code-based UI component library, and Storybook?
Feel like this is generally greenfield territory so looking for advice and landmines to avoid.
Thanks!
So, so rusty. Picked up a new Wacom tablet to get back into the drawing habit. Love how their stylus and screen combination feels compared to the Apple Pencil.
Geoff Alday retweeted
you may not know this, but you don’t have to have 100 agents simultaneously looping for you to ship something people want.
