Why your AI only gives you slop
Ask an AI for a design and you get something generic. Ask someone who spent 12 years running UI/UX and AI at Apple and they say you're only using 1% of what these models can create.
So what's in the other 99%?
Anshu Chimala has a process for getting there. Check it out.
Dan Abramov joins for the Season 3 premiere
Season 3 of Señors @ Scale is finally here, this Monday, September 7th.
The guest: Dan Abramov, creator of Redux, former Engineer at Meta and BlueSky, who is now helping build Next.js at Vercel.
We get into the state of React, the state of the ecosystem, and AtProto (everything AtProto! So if you are like me who knew nothing about it, give it a listen).
Subscribe now so you received it first in the morning 👇
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Community reads
AI and agents
Tokens aren't enough: what I learned teaching AI my design system by Rima Khachatryan — she handed the AI every token and guideline a new hire gets, and its not enough.
How LLMs Actually Work by 0xkato — from tokens to transformer blocks to the next-token loop, the whole path from your prompt to its answer.
Running a Software Factory Efficiently at Uber Scale by Uday Kiran Medisetty — usage across their agentic tools grew 9.4x since February. But they managed to keep total spend the same. Here is how.
Engineering leadership
Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code by Rachel Laycock — if AI can write code faster than humans can review it, is code review even solving the right problem?
Principles for building a design engineering practice by Karl Koch — he's building DuckDuckGo's design engineering team from two people. Check out his guiding principles.
Web platform and performance
The Browser's Main Thread Is Expensive by kciter — bundle size and network requests get all the attention, so what's still eating the main thread after you've optimized both?
Reducing Zod's memory footprint by an order of magnitude with method memoization by Colin McDonnell — a bare z.string() went from 7.5kb of retained heap to 784 bytes, check out how they did it.
Design Tokens, Web Components, and CSS @layer by Stuart Robson — where token metadata stops carrying a design system across a shadow boundary.
Tooling
ESLint: making JavaScript's rules programmable by Mark Stuart — before ESLint, every repeated code review comment had nowhere to live except someone's memory.
Shit on fire yo
Please, I beg you, we need to stop using Stored Procedures (from applications) by Andrew Hessler — he's begging application developers to stop hiding business logic inside the database.
Book recommendation
Finally got around to this one after hearing about it for years.
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace
Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar and later ran both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios as president. The book is his account of protecting creative work inside a company built to scale it, told through the crises that nearly sank the studio along the way.
Meme of the week
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is next week. Last chance for a discount! DONT MISS IT!
Use code REACTJSBARCELONA_10 for 10% off tickets.
CityJS Athens
CityJS lands in Athens this October.
My link takes 10% off the ticket price for you.
React Day Berlin
React Day Berlin takes over Kosmos on December 4.
Register through my badge and the remote ticket is free, which normally costs €90 at the early bird rate. You get the HD stream and the free remote workshops, and the recordings afterwards.
Register with my badge and watch for free
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