Best reads for PMs & Designers
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First seen 12 September 2025
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.
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.
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
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
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