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Save the date: Config 2027 is set for May 25–27 at Pier 80 in San Francisco, in person and virtual. Speaker applications are open until November 16.

After years without a design chief over both hardware and software, Apple isn’t hiring one. Mark Gurman reports that John Ternus has taken the role himself, working in the studio several times a week. ​“Steve Jobs, of course, was known for taking a similarly direct approach to design while working with Ive. But Ternus’ involvement marks a major shift from the Cook era. Designers say Cook typically visited the studio for about an hour once a month, at most.”

DS Manager adds an MCP server so agents can edit a shadcn/​ui design system without breaking the rules you locked. Handy if your team builds on shadcn and the shadcndesign Figma kit.

Mentha is Mintlify’s design system for an agent-heavy team. Fay Dakrouri’s takeaway: the more instructions, skills, and component constraints you feed an agent, the better its first direction, though someone still has to judge whether the result solves the problem tastefully.

“Intelligent UI is a step toward a ChatGPT that can shape an interface around what you’re trying to do. Over time, we want ChatGPT to create more of the interfaces people need for everyday tasks. You should be able to describe what you want to accomplish and work with an experience built around it.” OpenAI’s take on generative UI ships to all ChatGPT users, built on a component library plus a model trained to judge layout and interaction.

Manuel Muñoz Solera, aka mamuso, turned his personal site into a shelf of fake Famicom-style game cartridges, one per job. On a phone, long-press a cartridge and blow into the mic and it tilts back and shakes in the wind, the same ritual as blowing on a Nintendo cartridge.

Evil Martians’ eight-part framework for keeping AI-built interfaces consistent. Component contracts say when to use and not use each component, an inventory lets agents shortlist components before reading any code, and a design linter fails the build on a raw hex color. The agent skill is published too, split into craft and use workflows.

Anton Lovchikov, Head of Design at Evil Martians, makes the case that ​“a designer’s main job isn’t drawing screens. It’s pulling rules out of chaos and making sure they’re followed.” His proof is a 700-line localization refactor, after which Claude rewrote half the strings. The fix was a three-layer system of product principles, copy rules traced back to them, and skills built on those rules. Now when he dislikes a string, he asks Claude which rule produced it and fixes the rule.

A checklist for spotting AI-generated interfaces, written after a college app’s ​“minor UI improvements” update. Gradients everywhere, pulsing ​“active” badges that can never be inactive, fingernail cards, glassmorphism, and taglines built from ​“Elevate”, ​“Seamless” and ​“Unleash”.

Why stay in the details when agents can do the hard part? Geoffrey Litt, design engineer at Notion, says the time spent in the nooks and crannies of a problem loads your memory with the raw material your brain recombines later, even in the background. His choice for the AI era: get lazy and settle for good-enough, or work harder than ever. ​“You can already start to tell who is taking each path.”

“Saying what you’re not filters as hard as saying what you are.” Danny Martinez, co-founder of Decimals, on why the CEO of Arrows telling candidates up front that his company isn’t a 996 shop made a designer email him right away, and soon after take the job.

More than 6,000 hand-folded paper ​“libellula” (Italian for dragonfly) designed by Jony Ive’s LoveFrom fluttered down from the dome of Milan’s Galleria for the Vogue World finale. Each one is folded from a single sheet with no glue. The team used Codex to simulate the Galleria and see how the cloud would look at different sizes and densities.

“Benchmark and read the transcripts” – the most useful lesson in Atlassian’s write-up on building a CLI for its design system. The dashboards told them whether the agent succeeded. The transcripts showed agents ignoring carefully written instructions and reading source files instead. Charlie Sutton, Atlassian’s Chief Design Officer, adds that the public ADS MCP and CLI together cover 90%+ of atlassian.design.

Anthropic’s playbook for Opus 5.5 is mostly about longer runs: name the finish line, delete ​“think carefully” lines, and let it work. For designers, the section to bookmark is the one on design direction: ​“With no design direction, Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles. A general instruction like ​“avoid a generic look” mostly swaps one default for another. A list of specific patterns works much better.” Anthropic’s own example ban list reads like a catalog of today’s AI aesthetic: cream or off-white backgrounds, italic accent words in headings, numbered ​“01 / 02 / 03” section labels, monospace labels, and pill-shaped buttons. Worth copying into your prompts whatever model you use.

“A guideline can describe the brand. It cannot participate in the work.” Paul Jun, who leads brand at Ramp, on why in-house brand teams turned into service desks and what should replace them. Ramp’s version already works – you @mention an agent in Slack, attach a doc, and get a finished deck back in HTML, PDF, and PowerPoint. His proposed team pairs artists who set the bar with builders who turn it into components, agents, and evals. ​“Taste remains human. Repetition becomes software.”

In 1906, John Philip Sousa warned that the phonograph would become ​“a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.” Jeffrey Katzenberg traces a line from Sousa to the fight over ​“canned music” in sound film to his own decision to end hand-drawn animation at DreamWorks: ​“This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms.” His line on today’s models: ​“It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done.”

“Whoever holds the title is not the head of design. They were hired to build somebody else’s caring into the organization, so it survives that person leaving the room.” Renato Valdés-Olmos, who led design at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly, and Pitch, argues the real head of design is whoever ranks highest and cares most.

Copy a frame from Figma Design, paste it into Figma Weave, and it becomes a node in your workflow. You choose which text and image layers the workflow can change, and the fonts, layout, and spacing stay exactly as designed. Edits sync both ways, so every connected asset stays current.

Will Newton, Staff Product Designer at Ramp, wrote up the demo he gave at the Design x AI event. His ​“design harness” is a folder with two text files: Rules​.md tells the agent how to behave and what to never do, Design​.md holds colors, type scale, spacing, component styles, and the philosophy behind them. Everything else (Paper, Figma via MCP, HTML prototypes, production code) hangs off that folder. No app, no plugin – just plain text an agent reads before it touches anything.

Rogie King on how generative shaders went from a vibe-coded ​“FigGPU” prototype to the Config keynote in two months. The detail I keep coming back to: progressive blur took the Figma Draw team months to build, and Rogie recreated the same effect with one or two prompts. He’s also honest about what didn’t work – his working prototypes were great for designers and useless as references for engineers, PMs, and stakeholders, so the team backed up to static Figma mocks to get alignment first.