Best reads for PMs & Designers
Get 5 personalized best reads each week, with TL;DR and clear next steps.
One free email every Tuesday · No sponsored posts · See a sample email
Topics
Sources
First seen 30 May 2025
An opportunity hiding in plain sight is that much of the Instagram audience seems to prefer the Muse visual interface to iMessage. Muse has done some things well, but in many ways it’s a v1 UI for the most powerful capability that’s been invented since ChatGPT. Somebody’s going to build a more opinionated design that’s counter-positioned against Muse / specialized for an audience in a way that’s hard to copy, and run away with a really valuable part of the market.
One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)x.com · 19 September 2026
I think there are lots of good reasons to worry about whether AI is giving correct answers (especially free models), but, given the contradiction with other recent research suggesting AI is now doing well at financial advice, I was curious about what the methodology was here. I downloaded the report, which is from a company selling different AI financial services products. Given the limited information in the report, it is impossible to judge it's accuracy, since there are only limited examples of questions. However, I am curious if anyone familiar with UK tax law knows whether GPT-6 Pro's defense of Haiku's answer is right, or if Saturn's critique is.
Hiten Shahx.com · 19 September 2026
This is a wild amount of engineering to solve what is becoming a very important problem. How does the agent know the work actually worked? I suspect verification ends up eating a lot more of the agent stack than people expect.
Jared Palmer, VP Eng at Cognitionx.com · 16 September 2026
you can tell @natfriedman built Muse because almost every interaction is under 150ms
Andrew Chen, a16zx.com · 15 September 2026
ok great now I have 3 messy inboxes I have to check: - stuff my agents have done on scheduled loop that I need to review - bookmarked slack messages off Google Docs and slides to review - my actual email inbox lol
The Looking Glass (Julie Zhuo)x.com · 11 September 2026
The software of the future promises more power and flexibility for more imagination. We started with use-case software, moving to platform software, moving to all-purpose coding agents. Interface design is shifting rightward. A few things to keep in mind for designers: 1. Make the interface malleable. 2. Let preferences reach past the rule book. A descriptive vision beats fifty toggles. 3. Let feedback change the product. 4. Treat the seams as part of the experience. Nobody lives in one tool. And of course, the hardest of all: help people imagine bigger. Imagination is now the scarce resource.
Hamel Husainx.com · 15 August 2026
Grok Bot is cool because it is "self-driving" (like Codex desktop). It can create new threads/tasks and communicate b/w them It's also a simple interface and decent computer use + nice iOS app. I found computer use lagging behind Codex slightly but its worth trying it, especially if you have a Cursor Ultra sub https://t.co/zKGOk8KKwl
Scott Belsky, a16z, ex-Adobe CPOx.com · 15 August 2026 · not counted as a party
consumer products ultimately succeed because of how people feel about themselves using them, and how quick the tricks of past eras (ego analytics, surprise + delight, and hooks to appeal to our initial laziness, vanity, and selfishness in the first mile of a new product experience) are now being reimagined, but still hold true. - new agent experiences must yield a quick ROI on the time and data
Ben Tossellx.com · 13 August 2026 · not counted as a party
grok bot not showing thinking is prob the future (for fast models) but if a task is taking more than a few seconds, it should output text to say what its doing nothing worse than seeing 'is working' for 10's of seconds +
Brian Lovin, Notionx.com · 13 August 2026
First impressions of Grok Bot: - With Grok Bot you don't juggle threads, you juggle named/personified agents. This seems like a ~fine mental model: hire a team of specialists that can talk among themselves to get work done. - But this creates some problems when you want to multitask within a single agent. If you give an agent a chunky task that takes a long time, you don't really want to interrupt
Nikunj Kothari, FPVx.com · 13 August 2026 · 2 posts · not counted as a party
Grok Bot is a fantastic release.. the UX, the design, the onboarding :chefs-kiss: But I go back and forth on this a lot: Will users (personal and business) want one super agent that holds all the context or sub agents that are designated to do a slice of tasks? If we treat agents as humans, then the Grok Bot design makes a ton of sense. It allows us to compartmentalize tools, context, outcomes for
Drew Breunigx.com · 12 August 2026 · not counted as a party
Feel like there’s going to be 100+ multiplayer coding harnesses in the next 30 days. It’s going to ironic when the network effect for coding agents turns out to be the same network effect as the SaaS era. SaaS is dead, long live SaaS.
Karri Saarinen, Linear CEOx.com · 12 August 2026
Interesting aspect is both user usage is up, and mcp is up. And kind of makes sense that as agents do more work, you can parallelize more, the mcp usage becomes more too. @linear is both destination and source for agents and humans
Geoffrey Litt, Notion, ex-Ink & Switchx.com · 9 August 2026 · 2 posts · not counted as a party
Hm, is PDF the ideal format for agents submitting complex forms? Because you can review a draft a lot more easily than with a web form
Peter Yangx.com · 9 August 2026 · 2 posts
@ChatGPT Trying to convert normies to go from the web to the desktop app to enjoy the power of agents and even with my manual onboarding it's confusing.
Maggie Appleton, GitHub Nextx.com · 9 August 2026 · 2 posts · not counted as a party
This is a pretty bro idea but I still like it. Realistically more like a half marathon hackathon, but you get a break to redirect the agents every ~20-60 mins so less intense. Most people could probs run a half without much training.
Luke Wroblewski, Sutter Hillx.com · 7 August 2026 · not counted as a party
this demo still resonates because it makes computing... natural. - no voice commands to memorize, uses natural language - no query syntax, uses fuzzy search - no cursors, uses direct manipulation/touch - etc. lets people act like people, not computers.
Emil Kowalski, Linearx.com · 7 August 2026 · not counted as a party
Why friction might actually be a thing we need: https://t.co/pJqOePf6PW