future(memo)

01The sheets20 essays · 45,308 words

I Built Claude Cowork Before Anthropic. Here’s the Tension Every Builder Faces Today.

PrefaceI loathe the hustlers flooding the internet with claims of cloning billion-dollar apps in a day. This piece isn't about how fast you can build with AI. Much to the contrary, it's about how pointless that mindset becomes in the age of AI. Speed without direction leads nowhere. The interesting question isn't how quickly can I ship. It's what does it mean when anyone can ship quickly. January 12th, 2026. Anthropic announces Claude Cowork. Ten days of work. I spent all of 2024 convincing people, mostly non-coders, to use Cursor. The premise was simple: making things with nothing but natural language was now possible. Product Managers. Designers. Researchers. Sales. Marketers. Anyone who participated in the making could now be empowered to bring their ideas to reality independently. No waiting for engineering. No translation through tickets and specs.

No. 01 · MAR 2026I Built Claude Cowork Before Anthropic. Here’s the Tension Every Builder Faces Today.

future(memo)No. 02

How Future Designers Will Win in the Age of AI

Recap of the Series so farParts I-III established the crisis. The paradigm shifted. Designers control 5% where they once controlled 85%. Design Leadership is paralyzed. But critique without action is performance. This final part outlines three paths to sovereignty: Brand, Product, and Intelligence. And what it takes to seize them before the window closes. In 1450, a blacksmith in Florence possessed something that very few knowledge workers in our modern society possess: sovereignty. From raw iron to finished horseshoe, from commission to delivery, they controlled the entire value chain. They didn't need permission from a VP of Horseshoe Strategy. They didn't wait for the Metallurgy Team to approve their approach. They didn't coordinate through six layers of management to validate market fit. They had iron, a forge, a hammer, and skill. That was enough.

No. 02 · JAN 2026How Future Designers Will Win in the Age of AI

future(memo)No. 03

A New Class of Software Builders is Emerging

Software powers every industry, yet its creation is limited to a small pool of experts. There are only about 30 million professional developers worldwide, and it takes years to train each one [Sequoia: 1]. This bottleneck stifles innovation – we simply “cannot yet create software at the speed of our imagination” [Sequoia: 2]. Generative AI now offers a chance to break this barrier. Generative AI is lowering the barrier to software creation, enabling “tons of code to be generated by people who are not otherwise coders” [Reid Hoffman: 3]. In other words, non-technical individuals with ideas – from kids and creators to solopreneurs and business operators – can increasingly build software without traditional coding [NYT: 4]. Evidence of this shift is growing; everyday consumers are for the first time able to build fully interactive apps (not just simple websites) using AI-driven tools [a16z: 5].

No. 03 · NOV 2025A New Class of Software Builders is Emerging

future(memo)No. 04

A Survival Playbook for an AI-first World

Most people are stuck in one of two states: panic or paralysis. But survival in this new era won’t come from waiting it out. It’ll come from acting with urgency and clarity—not by fighting the machine, but by learning how to wield it. This is your playbook—for those who’ve been displaced, those trying to stay ahead, and those just getting started. It's been divided between three sections: For those out of work, for those still holding onto their jobs, and for students or recent graduates. The job market is brutal right now. Talent is flooding every open role. Recruiter ghosting is the norm. Roles are vanishing. Your résumé—no matter how keyword-stuffed for LLMs—feels like a relic. But this is also the most unconstrained moment of your career. You have nothing left to lose—and everything to build.

No. 04 · NOV 2025A Survival Playbook for an AI-first World

future(memo)No. 05

AI Doesn’t Create Slop. Humans Do.

The intellectual highlight of my last week was a video by Ryo Lu, the head of design at Cursor. In it, Lu walks us through ryOS, his personal operating system built like a toy, powered by AI, and humming with the spirit of 1990s Mac software. You half expect to hear a "hello" startup chime. He says, “I just spend hours coding and obsessing over every little detail, building this with one or two prompts mostly.” A sort of improvisational dance with machine intelligence. Lu isn’t just showing off “Baby Cursor.” He’s showing us what creativity looks like in an era where the machine isn’t an obstacle to originality but a co-conspirator. He doesn’t talk about productivity. He talks about soul. Watching him feels like watching a painter hold a new kind of brush. It should. AI is a new kind of brush. But it can only move to the rhythm and consciousness the painter invokes on the canvas.

No. 05 · NOV 2025AI Doesn’t Create Slop. Humans Do.

future(memo)No. 06

AI Is Making You Faster—and Dumber

AI helps me do things faster. Think faster. Win faster. But despite how self-aware I am when using it, something more insidious is happening: AI is slowly eroding my agency. Not by force, but by seduction. If there's one thing that’s fueled my career, it’s the ability to spot the right strategic imperative early—and craft a compelling narrative that gets everyone on board. Writing is leverage. If you can't articulate clearly, you won’t convince. You certainly won’t inspire action. In collaborative settings with humans, there’s space to explore. We wrestle with ambiguity, walk through edge cases, and push each other until the idea sharpens. The eureka moment is shared, the ownership distributed, the insight earned.

No. 06 · NOV 2025AI Is Making You Faster—and Dumber

future(memo)No. 07

AI has a ‘That’s a Feature, not a Product’ Problem

I remember the first time I got access to GPT. After a decade long habit of setting alarms on Siri, GAssistant and Alexa, my first interactions with GPT were elementary. Realizing my folly instantly, I had to pause and recalibrate my approach; exponentially increasing the complexity of the things I asked. In a few minutes I realized this was a step change in computing. In the last two years however that delight has worn off. Is this because the human mind is fickle, or is there something else happening here? I use everything built with AI daily - ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and more. And yet, despite my proficiency in these tools, I’ve failed to convince my wife and best friends to use them. My wife works at the forefront of edge computing and IoT, our best friends (a cancer specialist and a peds anesthesiologist), all three couldn’t care less; let alone pay $20/month. Their collective reasoning, “these assistants are very tedious to use.”

No. 07 · NOV 2025AI has a ‘That’s a Feature, not a Product’ Problem

future(memo)No. 08

AI is Collapsing How We Build — and Rewiring Org Charts

In the high‑stakes theater of Silicon Valley, where billion‑dollar ideas are born—and buried—within a single funding cycle, I’ve spent the last 15 years as both observer and occasional participant. Three core vectors have long explained startup success. Differentiation - how startups differentiate themselves in crowded markets. E.g. Stripe abstracted away the complexities of payments and tailor-made their platform for developers. Competition - which incumbents business model will be disrupted. E.g. Airbnb dismantled the hotel industry's stranglehold through peer-to-peer trust. Transformation - how cultural and operational norms evolve businesses function. E.g. Instacart redefined supply chains by connecting grocery inventories with on-demand shoppers.

No. 08 · NOV 2025AI is Collapsing How We Build — and Rewiring Org Charts

future(memo)No. 09

Are you an AI Illiterate?

Early this year, when the Seattle sun was still hidden behind a gray, I tasked three designers with an identical task to imagine a new product. “█████ ████ ██████ ██ ███ ███████.” The only constraint was each had two weeks until they can tell me if we should invest and if the concept has legs. Each worked on the problem independently, and since they worked across different teams they weren’t aware of each others pursuits. All three designers have similar design school backgrounds, are extremely talented, with no prior coding experience. The only difference between them was the total years of experience. Two weeks later, it was time to review their outputs, which were in drastically different formats.

No. 09 · NOV 2025Are you an AI Illiterate?

future(memo)No. 10

Designers Have to Move from the Surface to the Substrate

Recap of Part I: Designers Must Look to Demis Hassabis, Not Jony Ive As the paradigm shifted in the early 1970s, design leaders like Jony Ive ushered in a new era of personal computing. Focusing on surfaces that made technology ubiquitous and desirable. But that era is ending, and the real design work has moved to the intelligence layer beneath those surfaces. Where Ive architected poetry for the eye, Demis Hassabis is architecting poetry for the mind. He represents the new kind of leader, design as a craft desperately needs to look to. For most of computing history, designers have been the authors of the visible world. They shaped the screens we tap, the icons we recognize, the patterns we repeat until they feel second nature. From Xerox PARC to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, nearly every interface worth designing has already been designed. The metaphors of interaction: the desktop, folders, windows, menu, tap, swipe, are now complete, endlessly iterated but rarely reinvented.

No. 10 · NOV 2025Designers Have to Move from the Surface to the Substrate

future(memo)No. 11

Designers should look to Demis Hassabis. Not Jony Ive.

Not metaphorically. Literally beige. Computers in the 1990s came in one color: the pale, institutional tan of filing cabinets and government offices. They squatted under desks like appliances. Humming, hot, hostile. Thick cables snaked across floors. Fans whirred. Monitors flickered with the sickly glow of cathode rays. The interface was a command line: green text on black, cryptic strings of code that demanded fluency before granting access. Design wasn't just absent. It was deliberately excluded. These machines were built by engineers for other engineers, and the aesthetic language was purely functional: beige boxes, sharp edges, screws visible on every surface. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to accept its ugliness as the cost of entry.

No. 11 · NOV 2025Designers should look to Demis Hassabis. Not Jony Ive.

future(memo)No. 12

Qubit Teams: The Future Built by Two

For decades, a team of eight or ten could build future products. Now, two people augmented with AI can do the same work, and more. Jeff Bezos once offered a rule of thumb that became gospel in the tech industry: a product team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. It was more than a joke about appetites. It was a parable about focus. In the era of high-performance product cultures, when every release demanded painstaking coordination, “two-pizza teams” became a way to import startup speed into lumbering corporations. A self-contained group of eight to ten could move without drowning in process. Scarcity sharpened judgment. Fewer voices meant clearer decisions. The pizza was a metaphor for constraint as much as camaraderie.

No. 12 · NOV 2025Qubit Teams: The Future Built by Two

future(memo)No. 13

Sour FIG—Figma’s Future is Uncertain Despite IPO Hype

SAN FRANCISCO — It was a hot June morning in 2023 when Jordan Singer took the stage at Config, Figma’s annual conference, playfully dubbed “Coachella for designers.” Just months after his AI design startup, Diagram, was acquired by Figma, Singer offered a glimpse of the future of AI in Figma. The crowd, mostly designers and product managers, greeted the vision with enthusiasm. The company was riding high—Adobe had agreed to acquire it for $20 billion, and Figma had become the de facto canvas for software design. The blockbuster $20 billion acquisition was scuttled. Singer and other colleagues from the Diagram acquisition departed Figma, prompting questions about execution and internal alignment. Figma’s first AI initiative, “Make Designs,” was apologetically pulled from public use after backlash that its outputs were derivative—nearly indistinguishable from Apple’s own apps. At Config 2025, Figma raced to present a version of the company that was positioned to impress Wall St, in anticipation of its IPO announcement in a month. Having built up its position as a category-defining tool

No. 13 · NOV 2025Sour FIG—Figma’s Future is Uncertain Despite IPO Hype

future(memo)No. 14

Stop Confusing Vibe Coding with Context Engineering

We live in an age where most people barely read past the headlines. Quick to react, slower to reflect, even slower to understand. This is especially dangerous as AI hurtles forward. Even those working at the frontier can barely keep up. When AI is being crammed into everything imaginable, it's a classic sign of a bubble. And amid all this noise, clarity becomes essential. That’s why naming things matters. Definitions are the scalpel we use to cut through the fog. They bring intellectual precision to an otherwise shapeless buzz, helping us isolate signal from the surrounding noise. So let’s pause and understand the difference between Vibe Coding and Context Engineering. Back in 2021, I led a small team in partnership with OpenAI to reimagine how Codex models could become more interactive. Transforming ChatGPT into a true pair programmer. OpenAI had started to realize that GPT was getting good at writing and debugging code, so making it a pair programmer felt like the obvious next step. Even then, we knew that pasting code snippets into a chat window and bouncing back to the Developer

No. 14 · NOV 2025Stop Confusing Vibe Coding with Context Engineering

future(memo)No. 15

The Case for Apple Buying OpenAI for $500B

Disclosures: Satya funds my day job. I’m spending Tim’s cash, and borrowing Sam’s deal-making stardust. Opinions are mine alone; all three CEOs are blissfully uninvolved. In 2007, Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone — deriding its lack of a keyboard and $500 price tag. Microsoft, long the dominant force in personal computing, failed to adapt to the mobile era. What followed was a slow decline into irrelevance in consumer tech. Recently, Apple’s Craig Federighi responded to questions about Siri’s limitations and Jony Ive’s rumored ambient device with confident but brittle language. The parallels are unsettling. In both cases, a market leader, steeped in its past strengths, underestimated the scale of a platform shift. The next platform shift—generative AI—will be even larger: analysts peg the global AI market at ≈ $400 billion in 2025 and > $1.8 trillion by 2030 (35% CAGR) (Grand View Research 2024).

No. 15 · NOV 2025The Case for Apple Buying OpenAI for $500B

future(memo)No. 16

The Design Leaders Are Lying to You

Recap of Part II: Designers Have to Move From the Surface to the SubstrateWe examined how the interface era established design as a strategic function, but also locked it into surface-level thinking. While designers mastered visual polish and user flows, the real architecture of digital experiences: algorithms, data models, system logic, remained beyond their reach. That separation seemed acceptable when interfaces were the primary medium. But as intelligence moves into the substrate, that divide has become a crisis. Design's hard-won credibility was built on frameworks that no longer map to where consequential decisions are made.Now, we examine the institutional response, and why it's failing.

No. 16 · NOV 2025The Design Leaders Are Lying to You

future(memo)No. 17

The Vibe Coders are Lying to You

Lovable announced their GPT‑5 integration and, in a less than 15‑minutes, rebuilt a working ChatGPT client complete with Stripe authentication. OpenAI is around a $500 billion secondary valuation; Lovable publicly raised $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation in July. The comparison isn't about parity. Lovable rides OpenAI's models. Rather, it’s a signal. When the marquee product of our times can be recreated in just 15 minutes, it means one thing. Code is commoditizing. Code and engineers were the blocker before. But the constraint has shifted. It's not about scaffolding or imagination anymore. It's about everything around the code. The data rights, distribution, workflow embedding, reliability, and the discipline to ship continuously. That's the real challenge. Those who ship products for a living have always known this truth.

No. 17 · NOV 2025The Vibe Coders are Lying to You

future(memo)No. 18

What Most People are Oblivious About AI Hype

But beneath the panic lies a quieter power shift—one far more calculated than most realize. The panic is real—but mostly misplaced.Yes, AI is displacing jobs. But the real story isn’t your résumé. It’s who’s controlling the infrastructure of intelligence—and how they’re using fear as fuel. AI doomerism is a product, not a prediction. Headlines like “AI to kill X million jobs” spike during venture raises. Days after Anthropic announced its $750M round, it pushed a job extinction narrative across major outlets. PR choreography, not clairvoyance. Fear is a feature. The loudest voices warning about AI extinction often have deep ties—to safety think tanks, policy shops, and lobbying groups that stand to benefit from tighter regulatory control. In some cases, AI lab leaders are directly connected to the very strategists shaping that policy push. The message? Limit access, centralize power, and use “safety” as the shield.

No. 18 · NOV 2025What Most People are Oblivious About AI Hype

future(memo)No. 19

Why I’m Giving Up My Design Title—And What That Says About The Future of Design

I vividly remember my first encounter with a private experimental version of GPT-4. It wasn't just the content of the responses that grabbed my attention; early versions often produced errors, making it clear that this was still very new technology. What truly struck me, though, was its eloquence. I thought about how language is uniquely human, the very thing that makes us the most advanced species on this planet. If we could replicate that power in an artificial system, regardless of its sentience, the potential would be enormous—solving everything from complex problems like protein folding, streamlining intricate enterprise workflows, and yes, even doing your taxes. We were then—and still are—at the beginning of a massive shift driven by artificial intelligence. Despite the skepticism, I've seen enough to believe this technology is fundamentally resetting the paradigm of work and human interaction. My background is in computer science with a specialization in human-computer interaction. Initially, I was drawn to design because I saw its potential to deeply enhance our relationship

No. 19 · NOV 2025Why I’m Giving Up My Design Title—And What That Says About The Future of Design

future(memo)No. 20

Why People are buying into AI Doomerism

Across boardrooms, hospitals, law firms, and startups, machines are already outperforming the knowledge worker—not in theory, but in production. You’re not watching the start of a shift. You’re standing inside it. This piece is your map through the storm, told in three parts: The Fear — Why AI panic is gripping headlines and reshaping jobs faster than people can reskill. The Fog — What most are missing while staring at layoffs and hype cycles. The Playbook — How to avoid obsolescence and emerge on the other side—not just employed, but amplified. Despite ongoing debates over benchmarks and bias, a stark reality is taking shape: across reasoning, problem-solving, expertise, judgment, and business outcomes, today’s AI models have already eclipsed the average human — especially in structured cognitive tasks.

No. 20 · NOV 2025Why People are buying into AI Doomerism

(Future memo)