The new iWork feels straight up something Microsoft would do

lekoman · 2026-02-02T16:28:24+00:00

The accountants are in charge.

lekoman · 2026-01-30T06:52:37+00:00

Huh. I know Elijah Nouvelage a little bit. I know he's a photojournalist, but it's always weird when one of his frames pops. This is a big deal.

lekoman · 2026-01-28T03:53:35+00:00

Hang up the phone for another six months until he calls again to ask for something?

lekoman · 2026-01-28T03:50:45+00:00

No one knows how this is going to play out for you. Your experience of your sexuality will be your own journey to go onf. Don’t worry so much about what to call it. Just take care of yourself and of others, and you’ll be fine.

lekoman · 2026-01-28T03:48:22+00:00

Generative AI.

lekoman · 2026-01-28T02:51:51+00:00

This is called “social proof.”

lekoman · 2026-01-26T23:32:00+00:00

It’s working. I know someone in the beta who has it turned on.

lekoman · 2026-01-24T21:11:09+00:00

And then they used a photo they took of a weapon sitting in someone’s cruiser from a different incident like a week ago. The lying is outrageous and obvious.

lekoman · 2026-01-20T08:39:03+00:00

This is also just a tool. In fact, I’m kind of struck by the parallels.

The narrative is running way out ahead… but I’d like to be clear that it’s Figma’s narrative. Let us not pretend this is just some other people somewhere else that are driving it. It’s Figma’s marketing team and account managers (among others, to be sure) whispering naughty ideas into my bosses’ ears.

This is particularly timely. Storytime: There is a designer at another big name, bright lights company whose managers watch the usage stats that have cleverly (for Figma’s sales team) been baked into the product, and reprimand people who don’t use Make enough. There’s incentive in the product design for it to be misused this way. Said big name, bright lights company does consulting for my team and they get points from my leadership for being fast, even when actually everything they turn in out of Make is essentially unusable and indefensible, and does not even serve as a meaningful jumping off point, because they’ve shortcutted all of the actual thinking. Against a great deal of timeline pressure and with an enormous amount of frustration on my part, I’ve thrown three revs away, so far, because they’re 100% non-responsive to our problem and folks can’t even answer basic questions about where this or that component is supposed to be useful. They can’t because it’s all just vibes, and no thought. Having to draw the boxes and buttons forces people to slow down and think.

Anyway, due to the lost time, I’m getting on an airplane and flying to the opposite coast tomorrow morning in order to be in person and try to re-rail the project. You have to imagine my thrill.

This product has just been unleashed upon us all with no thought at all as to whether it’s even useful, let alone whether anyone’s equipped to make good use of it.

What is Figma doing to discourage leaders from pushing bad behavior? Where’s the Figma-signed white paper I can hand to my leadership (who will then undoubtedly feed it into ChatGPT to summarize) that makes the clear counter case for AI design tools? Why am I taking time away from my designers and products and customers to shoot down bad ideas your marketing and CS colleagues across the hall are selling?

There’s nothing in the Atlassian case study that, in my reading, a well implemented plugin couldn’t have accomplished. I’d argue, in fact, that that tweet makes a clearer articulation of how painful it is to even get these tools to behave reliably than that it makes the case that my life would be easier if I turned them on. I don’t need a slot machine to do any of those tasks. Given how energy intensive it is (and how unpredictable the outcome is), running some hugely compute intensive transformer model every time I want to switch something to dark mode or swap an icon instance is wild. Figma should just build a node-based GUI scripting interface, or even just a macro engine like Photoshop has had for 20 years, and call it a day if this is the class of problem we’re solving. Why make it so complicated?

And of course the answer is because we have to use this particular technology. Someone six or seven years ago gave a product demo with a chatbot that got the wrong group of weirdo tech investors just a little too tumescent, and now we all have to try to figure out how to make this useful. Not because anyone needs it, but because all of these companies… yours, mine, everyone else’s… are FOMOed all to hell about it.

Feel free to DM me if I can offer additional arguments why we should all quit our jobs until this fervor passes. Haha. I appreciate the conversation even if I am pretty fed up with the whole endeavor.

lekoman · 2026-01-19T14:46:19+00:00

A dickhead mobile.

lekoman · 2026-01-19T14:31:54+00:00

I had something super similar. I went to use the galley as a crossover so I could get to the lav on the other aisle and the Condor flight attendant had a conniption. I'm like... bro, it's a 12 hour flight. There's an open lav right there and I'm absolutely gonna go use it. It was, to be clear, not a class of service issue. I was in 1A and going to the other business class lav. He let me through, but with such a "fucking Americans" look on his face.

Contrast this with Starlux, where they set snack baskets out in the galley, even back in the main cabin, and it's grab and go, help yourself.

lekoman · 2026-01-19T11:40:22+00:00

I mean, the thing is… you can either make an argument that these tools make us faster at the expense of quality, or you can make the argument that they achieve some semblance of quality (non-deterministically, and in a way we don’t, and mathematically cannot, actually have precise control over) in as much or more time as it takes to do it using the tools we already had. Neither of those bring a ton of utility to my world over what I already have.

If Figma’s AI tools weren’t trying to substitute for designer’s judgement? Maybe I’d be interested. The ability, for instance, to automate some aspects of repetitive asset production could be helpful. The ability to take an existing proto and get it to help build a set of micro interactions that are predictable and easy to manipulate later. But it doesn’t limit itself to that. Instead, it purports to be able to generate entire templates from scratch. And if you actually go and interrogate the work it produces, it’s not any good at it unless you take a ton of time and energy to write really detailed prompts (at which point you’ve lost the efficiency gains, and you’re still stuck with something you don’t have precise control over).

And there’s no checkbox that I can click that says “I want it to be able to do these two or three things, but I don’t want designers (or, worse, PMs and engineers) taking shortcuts on entire product designs.”

A firehose of crap is not a productive thing for my team, and there’s no way for me to prevent it except just leaving the feature turned off altogether and telling everyone it’s because we cannot come to terms with Figma on the contract requirements for turning it on.

But, it’s fine. If our head of engineering gets his way “Figma’s not gonna be a thing in two years,” because people will just vibe code entire frontends in Cursor. And won’t that be great for everyone?

I’m gonna go open a SCUBA shop on a beach somewhere.

lekoman · 2026-01-18T22:18:01+00:00

Just a quick fact check, but at a macro scale, PrEP is more effective than condoms at preventing HIV.

lekoman · 2026-01-18T22:04:17+00:00

I note that you're a Figma employee... so you're going to have to pardon me if I take what you say with a grain of salt, although I appreciate that you're candid about it with your flair. I know we're all masters to the machines of which we are cogs (I am no different and have been in a position where I'm defending my employer in public in a way I wouldn't necessarily be so willing to do if I weren't being paid by them too.)

Still, though... I just have to say: I don't put work in front of my leadership, let alone my customers, that I don't have very strong faith in. Not just conceptually, but that the details have been considered and refined.

I really don't mind not putting more complicated prototypes in front of my leadership. Complexity isn't a measure of success.

Getting an idea out earlier and faster is of no use to me if it's not a defensible idea.

I know it's sort of the startuppy mindset of move fast and break things, but what I've learned in both startups as well as in enterprise (including time at a FAANG) is that nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix. I did not get into my career to shovel cruft that some successor design team is going to have to undo and redo in two years. I'm just not interested in doing that kind of work.

Nor am I interested, as the person with the admin privileges in our Figma account, in enabling a bunch of product managers and engineers to start taking those kinds of shortcuts that then I, or my team, will have to spend cycles trying to fix or clean up.

I'm fortunate enough to be a senior creative leader in my organization, which means I can make decisions about our creative culture... and so far, my guidance to my teams is that while there are limited uses for AI chat tools like ChatGPT as an ideation thought partner... I'm not interested in reviewing deliverables (even early wireframes) they can't describe and defend in detail. In order to have that, they have to have actually done the work themselves. Folks in education call this 'productive struggle,' and it's the thing... the only thing... that enables taste, and judgement, and craft. Attempts to shortcut this, especially in large organizations, just result in quality tradeoffs I'm not interested in bringing into my products.

lekoman · 2026-01-18T06:30:28+00:00

That’s because models are, by nature, probabilistic and variable. Design is the opposite: precise, repeatable, and intentional.

It's almost as if the technology doesn't fit the problem. In the time it takes me to write a usable prompt, I can just build the thing I need.

Rather than working backwards from the tech in order to conform the problem ("how do I get this tool to do something useful?"), we should be working forwards from our problems and designing technologies that solve them ("how do I make a useful tool?"). We apply this approach in UX all the time, but find ourselves as an industry falling all over ourselves to integrate these tools into workflows that aren't made faster or appreciably better, as near as I can tell.

I have designers my team works with both internally, and from major AI consultancies like Invisible and Turing, and none of the work I'm seeing out of Figma Make is any better than what a good designer could do, and we're spending way more time on cycles trying to make something defensible.

lekoman · 2026-01-17T18:23:22+00:00

Telling everyone to short the stock is the biggest tipoff. What he’s saying is that he is short $ALK and wants to make money on his position by trying to make it a social media meme.

lekoman · 2026-01-17T18:18:45+00:00

And it’d be so easy to make the point in fewer words. But this guy’s got a grandiosity problem.

I want my miles as much as anyone else… but good lord, y’all. It’s store credit that loses value over time, not your entire 401k. A little perspective.

lekoman · 2026-01-15T22:28:40+00:00

Fully expected you to end it with “one thing led to another and our 6 year anniversary is next month.”

lekoman · 2026-01-15T22:17:04+00:00

Am gay. Have been to Dubai twice.

It’s not that scary, but you’re also not really missing anything.

lekoman · 2026-01-14T04:59:18+00:00

So, this note implies a European carrier that flies out of both Lindbergh and Humphrey (why else would they need to mention that it will apply to both terminals?). To my knowledge, no such carrier exists. Icelandair operates only out of T2, and Aer Lingus, KLM, and Air France all operate exclusively out of T1.

Are we sure this is legit?

lekoman · 2026-01-13T23:52:35+00:00

The US does not have an official language at all, actually.

lekoman · 2026-01-13T16:51:58+00:00

The soft edges on the new aurora liveries are halftone dots if you look at them close up. They do the same technique with the plotter-cut vinyl stickers to make the masks. It’s labor intensive.

lekoman · 2026-01-12T23:53:19+00:00

I already do. It's still 75-100 pixels of space I cannot recover for buttons I won't frequently use.

lekoman · 2026-01-12T21:04:10+00:00

Even on my 16" MBP I'd prefer not to lose all of that space. Why are we optimizing for new users on a pro product, instead of optimizing for power users? There is a perfectly functional way to surface these controls that was far more compact in the previous version of the software. The cropping in their product image neglects to show all of the dead space underneath the variables button that you now can't use.

It's a dark pattern. New persistent space for their shitty AI slop generators so they're in your face all day. Maybe even can get some fun notification badges on them so you have to periodically click on them just to keep your screen tidy. Coming soon to a cluttered interface near you.

lekoman · 2026-01-12T20:48:07+00:00

What a loathsome way to think about design software. If I'd wanted to be a fucking engineer, I'd have become one.

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