Links from 2025 (213 links)

How LLMs are making traditional apps feel broken.

The Cannae Problem is not exclusive to ancient warfare. It stretches across institutions throughout history and into our modern world. When organizations, systems, movements and humans become victims of their own success, when they mistake "what worked before" for "what will always work," they create the conditions for catastrophic failure.

How to discuss and describe a design system’€™s biggest changes

This is a great example of how a mix of common challenges can stymie the common sense playbook. The mix of optics pressure, a "guarded" toxic personality, low trust, and a swamped partner is hard to surmount. Even an experienced manager will struggle in this situation.

Aha, Brewfile.

Via Popular.

What we need are the tools that let us compose across the stack. Then we can create self-contained LEGO blocks that run where appropriate—and snap them together. Any piece of UI can have its own backend needs and frontend needs. It’s time that our tools acknowledge that, embrace that, and let us speak our users’ language.

Via monospaced.

An open-source screen recorder built with web technology

Make faster, more accessible, more environmentally friendly websites, by removing these tags from your site's <head>.

Isn’t it amazing how the answer to everything is always the same? Pay attention. Trust the process. Seek to understand. Question your assumptions. Read a book.

User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience.

Being in a leadership position, particularly one where you hold ultimate responsibility like CEO or MD, is like juggling lots of balls. Some of those balls are made of rubber and some are made of glass. The rubber ones you can drop, as they will bounce, but the glass ones you can't drop as they will shatter. The skill is to work out which ones are rubber and which ones are glass.

A few years ago, while working on the GOV.UK Design System I spent probably a little too much time thinking about the differences between Components and Patterns.

A bit listicle but some fine examples.

Deep dive into structure and process.

Spicy “design tokens shouldn’t be authorable by hand” take.

Establishing a standardized design system lexicon

A Minimum Viable Design System (MVDS) is the smallest set of design standards, components, and guidelines that can effectively create consistency and efficiency in a product. It’s the design system equivalent of a Minimum Viable Product – just enough to start providing value, with room to grow and evolve as your product grows.

The evolution of scalable CSS is a multi-part chronicle intended to document the progress of tools, practices and techniques that enable us to write maintainable CSS at scale.

A high density, high value guide.

Really a useful comparison of LinguiJS and react-i18next.

Good birds-eye view.

Discover how Team Topologies and Data Mesh transform organizations by modernizing team structures, decentralizing data and unlocking AI-driven innovation.

Spicy times in design tokens world.

There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.

Dark mode interfaces have matured a lot in the past few years. We all know the "traditional" approach using media queries but in this article, Sara Joy demonstrates modern CSS features that make respecting user color scheme preferences pretty darn easy.

The shape of your design system team and the hierarchy it falls within can greatly impact the way you approach the work. A key role to the success of your program is the middle manager.

Deep dive into game branding.

The majority of thinking people continue to find “fashion” beneath serious analysis, which is ridiculous because so much of human life is conventional. Ideologies come in and out as a byproduct of social dynamics. The most important thing to understand here is the directionality: This nihilistic aesthetic is not the result of a right-wing conspiracy. The fundamental mechanics of fashion elevated the nihilistic aesthetic and turned it right-wing.

A classic, useful analogy.

No.

Umami is a privacy-first web and product analytics platform. Traffic, campaigns, behavior, conversions, and revenue in one place. No cookies, no surveillance, self-hosted or in the cloud.

From Floating Points’ forthcoming soundtrack for Lazarus, by Shinichirō Watanabe.

Truly independent web browser

Good post of barefoot shoe recs, including more dressy options.

After the arbitrator ordered Wynn-Williams to stop promoting her book, Stone, the Meta spokesperson, took to Threads with a link to the decision, writing, “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.” Commenters rushed in to block his victory lap: “i am now 500× more interested in this book!” “great sales pitch - thx big dog.” “Thanks for the heads up. Hadn’t heard about this one, but now excited to read it.”

A tiger team is a specialized, cross-functional team brought together to solve or investigate a specific problem or critical issue.

Taste over metrics, product teams over product managers, strategy over OKRs—and the importance of craft, profitability, and good judgment.

This.