Best reads for PMs & Designers
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First seen 12 September 2025
Harj Taggar, YCx.com · 9 September 2026
The next era of enterprise software design is Civilization-style interfaces on top of company brains and agents.
Omar Rizwanx.com · 9 September 2026
I always liked this design -- it felt more representative of how I actually think/interact with chat, where it can float on the side while I do other stuff, as opposed to being a primary activity that I have to switch the whole phone screen to
Smashing Magazinesmashingmagazine.com · 9 September 2026
10 min readUX, Design, AIThe web is evolving beyond menus, forms, and endless clicks toward experiences shaped around human intent. For UX designers, understanding this shift means re-evaluating their role, moving from designing visible interfaces to guiding transparent, intent-driven AI experiences.Ever since the commercialisation of the Graphical User Interface pioneered by systems like the Xerox Star and popularised by the original Apple Macintosh, software has relied heavily on point-and-click interactions. If you wanted to book a trip, buy a pair of shoes, or research a health symptom, you were expected to navigate a labyrinth of user interfaces. You click menus, adjust range sliders, fill out multi-step forms, deal with cookie pop-ups, and open dozens of browser tabs just to cross-reference basic information. We have become accustomed to spending more time managing the software rather than actually achieving our goals.That contract is officially changing. Driven by advances in artificial intelligence and large language models, a new generation of web tools is pioneering a radical philosophy: Intent-Driven Design.
Guillermo Rauch, Vercel CEOx.com · 8 September 2026
Chat has won. It's all chat + computer from this point on
Stephanie Walter, UX + accessibilitybsky.app · 7 September 2026
I think it's useful to understand how front-end works, and where its limits are, when you build interfaces. So if you want to vibecode, you still need the basics. "To wireframe or not?" Apparently AI can build a full prototype now, so we don't need wireframes anymore, they say.
UX Collectiveuxdesign.cc · 5 September 2026 · not counted as a party
Reading and writing are interfaces. And AI can reduce their friction.
Stack Overflow blogstackoverflow.blog · 1 September 2026
Ryan sits down with Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to the Java language at Sun Microsystems, to chat about what it was like building one of the most popular programming languages ever at its inception, why it was strategically important for the Java team to create a cross-platform ABI to compete with Windows NT, and how applets were initially just an interesting demo.
r/AI_Agentsreddit.com · 30 August 2026
An interesting topic I’ve been exploring lately is whether **filesystems might be the most intuitive data interface for AI agents**. Agents need persistent data they can retrieve, modify, and carry across sessions. Databases, APIs, and object storage can obviously do this, but files have one interesting advantage: LLMs already know how to wo
LangChain bloglangchain.com · 26 August 2026
I get this question a bunch. Developers generally first spend time getting the agent to work, but then they turn their attention to speed and cost. There are few things we see developers doing:Identifying where the latency is coming fromChanging the UX to reduce the “perceived” latencyMaking fewer LLM callsSpeeding up LLM callsMaking LLM calls in parallelIdentifying where the latency is coming fromThis may sound basic, but how you approach reducing latency will depend entirely on your specific bottleneck. Is the latency coming from one big LLM call, or from multiple small ones that just add up? You’ll need to diagnose these before trying to speed it up.LangSmith is an incredibly useful tool for this, providing complete visibility into your agent interactions. You can track the latency of each step of the agent, and we’ve also recently introduced a “waterfall” view to easily identify which steps contribute the most to overall latency.Changing the UX to reduce the “perceived” latencySometimes, the easiest way to reduce latency… is to not reduce latency.While it might seem counterintuitive at first, but if we think about why latency
Colm Tuite, Radix/Base UIx.com · 26 August 2026
At larger companies, there’s a pervasive myth that copying UI code means more maintenance. But if your npm dependency is wrapped and customised beyond recognition, you’re already maintaining it, just without controlling it.
Synthesiajobs.ashbyhq.com · 26 August 2026
Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow. ABOUT THE ROLE Synthesia is the #1 Enterprise AI video generation since 2016, and today we work with 90% of the Fortune 100. Our core product, Studio, lets anyone turn a script into a polished video with an AI avatar, no camera or crew required. Now we're entering a new chapter, and the API is at the center of it. Our Interactive Avatar API lets any company build real-time, conversationa
Dive Club (Ridd)rss.com · 25 August 2026
John Bai - The Grok Bot design jo...John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyDive Club 🤿 by RiddEpisode notesGrok Bot has been going viral the last two weeks so this week's episode is a behind-the-scenes of the design journey with John Bai (who was the first NYC design hire at Cursor).He screen-shares a ton of agent interaction pattern ideas as well as his unused concepts for the Grok Bot onboarding flow.Some highlights:- The prototype that led to the Grok Bot mascot- Why John realized chat was still the right UX for AI- How John uses agents to streamline his Figma work- Comparing John's onboarding concepts for Grok Bot- Why John still starts his design explorations in Figma- What it took to turn AI agents into a consumer product- Why no two designers at Cursor have the same tools/process- + a lot moreRidd mentioned ... Read moreKeywordsdesignproduct designux designui design
r/ProductManagementreddit.com · 18 August 2026
My friend and I have been building a small project for the past two months, and went through completely different project management setups. Before this, I was a startup founder of a 10+ member team. Back then, our team used Linear, I loved it, best-in-class UI in my opinion. But over time, I just found that we went to the
Lee Robinson, Cursorx.com · 17 August 2026
Grok @Bot has made a few simple yet powerful technical decisions that I believe make it easy and enjoyable to use. 1. The best UI is none at all. The product interface is dramatically simpler than alternatives without sacrificing functionality. How is this possible? It's one of the first products designed for current frontier model capabilities and has a UI restrained enough to remain easy to use as models improve exponentially. Everyone knows how to text. 2. A thin harness for the client, a thick harness for the server. You might have noticed the app feels very fluid to use, even for a beta product. This is primarily because of everything we didn't have to build. The app harness is essentia
Adam Wathan, Tailwindx.com · 17 August 2026
Really feels like the Cursor team saw the future when they first shipped the agents UI that everyone complained about. Think we're going to see them recapture a lot of mindshare over the next few months.
HubSpothubspot.com · 10 August 2026
You have owned monetization or the buying experience for a software as a service product. This is a core area of expertise for you. You have worked on a product with credit based, usage based, or outcome based pricing. You understand how these models affect both how a product is built and how it is sold. You have driven alignment across multiple product groups without relying on direct authority. You know how to influence decisions, build commitment, and move teams toward a shared outcome. You have meaningful AI product experience. You have worked on or alongside products built around artificial intelligence, and you understand how large language models are changing product strategy, customer expectations, and business models. You bring strong business model fluency. You can think strategically about pricing, packaging, monetization, and go to market motions, not only feature roadmaps. You have worked in both a scaled organization and a more entrepreneurial environment. You can navigate the complexity of a large company while remaining comfortable building something new from the ground up. You are a driver who moves quickly and takes ownership. Y
OpenAIjobs.ashbyhq.com · 7 August 2026
About the Team: The Shopping team is building the future of how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products through AI. Our mission is to help users make better purchasing decisions by combining OpenAI’s models with rich product information, merchant ecosystems, and personalized experiences. We sit at the intersection of AI, commerce, search, recommendations, and consumer product experiences, partnering closely with product, engineering, research, design, and business teams to reimagine shopping for the AI era. About the Role: As a Product Manager on the Shopping team, you’ll define and build the next generation of AI-powered shopping experiences within ChatGPT. You’ll be responsible for understanding user needs, identifying opportunities to improve product discovery and decision-making, and delivering experiences that help users confidently find and purchase the products that are right for them. You’ll work across a broad set of domains, including search, recommendations, personalization, merchant and product ecosystems, and conversational commerce. This role requires strong product judgment, comfort operating in ambiguity, and the ability to balance
Patrick Neemanuxdesign.cc · 4 August 2026 · 2 posts
Star Trek imagined talking to a computer decades before the tools arrived to answer. The show’s voice-first computer, plain-language querying, and universal translator anticipated the assistants we ship now — the interface, but not the intelligence. Science fiction tends to be wrong about the future in the ways that matter —here’s what Star Trek got wrong—and right in the ways that don’t. We never got the flying car, but we did get the touchscreen, the video call, and the thing in your pocket that answers questions that happens to be called a phone. I’ll be honest — I enjoyed Star Trek, but my father was a bigger fan of the show. I’m starting to recognize some of the parallels we’re seeing. I’m also seeing how Gene Roddenberry had a much more accurate vision than we would like to admit. Roddenberry died in 1991, long before anyone typed a question into a machine and got a thoughtful sentence back. He couldn’t have imagined the specifics — the chatbots that write poetry in Bukowski and debug code, the strange intimacy of talking to software that talks back. Our future, personified. He imagined all of it anyway: a ship’s computer you could reason wit
Midjourneyjobs.ashbyhq.com · 24 July 2026
ABOUT THE ROLE Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small, self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI. We're looking for a senior product designer who's spent years building software. You'll design core product experiences across web and mobile, working directly with engineers and researchers from the earliest stages of a project through launch. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own major product surfaces end-to-end: concept, flows, interaction, visual polish, ship - Invent interaction paradigms for things that haven't existed before and make those new paradigms legible and fun - Use research, experimentation, analytics, and user feedback to understand what people need and where products can improve. - Prototype constantly, in Figma and in code — tools like Claude and Cursor should be part of your workflow - Partner directly with engineering and research to refine interactions, iterate quickly, and ship high-quality work. YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF - You've spent the last decade designing software people love to use. - You're comfortable moving between i
Renderjobs.ashbyhq.com · 13 July 2026
At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure. Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemeral edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users. Our platform is trusted by over 7 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $260M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of moder
Taras Bakusevychuxdesign.cc · 30 June 2026
An applied framework for designing AI interfaces that support appropriate reliance, user control, transparency, and responsible autonomy. Traditional interfaces are built around predictable behavior. A control has a defined function. A workflow has known states. Errors can be anticipated and recovered from. AI systems are less deterministic. They introduce a property that most interface conventions weren’t designed for: the same input can produce different outputs. The same model can feel useful, confusing, or dangerous depending on the interface and instructions around it — product quality is not determined by model capability alone. AI introduces interaction problems that conventional UI patterns don’t resolve: When should the system suggest, ask, or act? How should uncertainty appear on screen? What evidence should accompany a generated answer? How much autonomy does a given action earn? Etc These are not cosmetic questions. They determine whether users can judge output, recover from mistakes, and remain responsible for consequential decisions. The central design question is How do we help users rely on AI appropriately? This arti
Decagonjobs.ashbyhq.com · 23 June 2026
About Decagon Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences. Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel. We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others. We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team. About the Team The Product Management team owns Decagon’s platform and foundational features: agent building, testing, experimentation, analytics, QA, versioning, integrations, and enterprise
Casey Newtonplatformer.news · 17 June 2026
This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here. Last week in our series on AI and jobs, Brookings' Molly Kinder warned us to prepare for a "messy middle": a long, “politically explosive” stretch in which AI job losses are concentrated among some of the best-paid workers in the economy. This week, for the first-ever Platformer live show, I wanted to talk to someone who believes in that vision: a founder building the tools that might bring it about, and who turned out to be unusually candid about what that might cost us. I've known Eugenia Kuyda for more than a decade. In 2015, after her best friend Roman Mazurenko died in a car accident, she gathered the text messages he had sent to friends and family and built a chatbot that let them speak with him again — a story I covered at the time for The Verge, nearly a decade before ChatGPT made chatbots ubiquitous. That project was the seed for Replika, the AI companion app that now claims more than 40 million users. Kuyda’s latest startup, Wabi, takes AI in a different direction — away from personal entertainment and into the world of work.
hello@smashingmagazine.com (Pratik Joglekar)smashingmagazine.com · 16 June 2026
In 2024, an Air Canada customer asked a chatbot about bereavement fares. The bot confidently gave him a refund policy that didn’t exist. The airline refused to honor it. A tribunal ruled in the customer’s favor. The bot hadn't decided anything; it had predicted an answer based on patterns in its training data. The company treated that prediction as policy. This is the risk at the heart of designing with AI today: probabilistic systems wrapped in deterministic interfaces. The AI offers a guess, the interface presents it as truth, and the user, or the organization, acts on it. Humans are wired for deterministic thinking. We prefer to believe that past actions determine future outcomes. Flip a coin 999 times and get heads every time, the deterministic mind assumes the coin is rigged. The probabilistic mind accepts that the 1000th flip could still go either way. That second mindset is harder to hold onto, but it is exactly what designers need right now. Products operate in complex, nonlinear environments, and AI is accelerating that complexity. When designers and product teams treat AI outputs as the answer rather t
Shield AIjobs.lever.co · 25 April 2026
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube. Job Description: We’re looking for a Human Machine Interface (HMI) Designer to join our team developing next-generation Ground Control Station (GCS) applications for unmanned aerial systems (UAS). This role is ideal for engineers with a strong foundation in real-time, performance-sensitive software who also bring experience with modern web technologies. You’ll work on mission-critical software designs that bridges responsive user interfaces with robust backend systems, enabling human operators to plan, command, and monitor autonomous assets with precision and reliability. Job Description: We’re looking for a Human Machine Interface (HMI
Stripestripe.com · 21 January 2026
We’re looking for someone who meets the requirements below, and has a passion for AI to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement. 7+ years of experience delivering highly successful and innovative software products which are ML powered Solid understanding of ML and applied AI tech stacks Demonstrated ability to influence company level strategy and work with business leaders to execute on the transformation You push the pace. You take blame and pass the praise. People love working with you. Proven ability to lead teams and work cross-functionally in a highly collaborative environment. Ability to analyze and use quantitative and qualitative data to inform decisions. A deep understanding and empathy for consumer and business users — you love building products that make our customers feel joy, delight and trust. Relentlessly drives product quality Capable of working on both 1P and 3P products
Harveyjobs.ashbyhq.com · 12 September 2025
WHY HARVEY At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come. This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched. Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you. At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — an