Erik’s Newsletter: Design Clarity, AI Interfaces, and Mental Models
Issue #80
🗓 Today at a Glance
Quote: "Design is clear thinking made visible"
Reading: How to Raise Strong Men
Podcast: Steve Ballmer on Product & Microsoft
Tweet: Design isn't what you see, it's how you think
Product: Function Health
Idea: "Glassdoor for AI models"
The conversation around AI is shifting from novelty to nuance. Interfaces are diverging, creators are ascending, and productivity is mutating. This month, a quieter trend: tools and mindsets that raise the ceiling by starting at the roots—from how we design to how we decide.
💬 Quote I’m Pondering
"Design is clear thinking made visible" — Edward Tufte
Design that works isn't decoration. It's the direct result of disciplined thinking and ruthless clarity about what matters.
🧠 What I’m Thinking About
Accepting a meeting but not showing up is a silent tax. Treat your calendar as a contract.
Alexa burned billions chasing ubiquity without a use case. Directionless speed is a featureless void.
AI creators will flourish. Bystanders will perish.
Nightly vibe coding. Morning clarity tests. Swipe files for the subconscious.
The new productivity stack: voice prompts while walking, agents as research assistants, deep work outsourced to LLMs.
📚 What I’m Reading
How to Raise Strong Men: Strength isn’t just taught, it’s modeled. Codie Sanchez outlines how to cultivate grit through structure, love, and high expectations (link).
Google IO Recap by Deedy Das: Veo 3 and other releases hint at a world where AI outputs leapfrog UI design, accelerating from prompt to production (link).
Future of AI Interfaces: Hiten Shah's thread tracks the fork: AI interfaces are splintering into voice-first, agent-based, and hyper-contextual UXs (link).
🧬 Something I Learned
Zapier's AI Fluency Rubric: Screening for AI readiness isn't about jargon, it's about comfort with ambiguity, toolchain fluency, and delegation mindset (link).
LLM Mechanics: The "Void" post explains transformer internals as a meditation on the statistical emptiness LLMs inhabit—predictive, but not generative in human terms (link).
🎧 Podcasts Worth Your Time
Steve Ballmer on Product & Microsoft: A look into speed, culture, and the unglamorous edge of execution (link).
Soft Skills in Product Management: Especially the segment on how to work with CEOs: adapt to pace, extract clarity from chaos, and present paths, not problems (link).
🐦 Tweets That Made Me Stop and Think
"Most people think design is above the iceberg": True design lives beneath the surface: vision, usability, strategy. Great products feel like one mind shaped them (link).
"AI replaces project managers, not builders": Greg Isenberg's 73% automation take isn’t hype—it's a prompt to redesign your job before someone else does (link).
🛠 Product I’m Loving
Function Health lets you run 100+ lab panels proactively. A dashboard for your biology, built for longevity-focused operators (link).
💡 Idea I Can’t Get Out of My Head
Glassdoor for AI Models: LLMs are the new hires. Why don’t we have reviews, benchmarks, and user experience logs for models embedded into workflows?