Search the archive

DAVOS 2026 WAS ‘TURNING POINT' FOR GLOBAL CRYPTO NORMALIZATION

White House advisor Patrick Witt declared Davos 2026 a turning point for US crypto normalization.

ZK-POWERED BITCOIN LAYER 2 CITREA LAUNCHES MAINNET

Citrea's mainnet is the first zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine on Bitcoin.

FIGJAM DIAGRAMMING IN CLAUDE

Claude now supports FigJam diagramming through the Figma connector, allowing users to transform conversations, documents, and images into visual diagrams, including flowcharts, state diagrams, Gantt charts, and sequence diagrams. This feature helps break down complexity and visualize processes, system states, project timelines, and workflows. Generated diagrams can be opened in FigJam for refinement and team collaboration.

INTRODUCING GOOGLE ADS FOR WEBFLOW: THE AI-DRIVEN WAY TO GROW SMARTER AND FASTER

Webflow has launched a Google Ads integration that allows marketing teams to create, manage, and optimize ad campaigns directly within the Webflow platform, eliminating the need to switch between tools. The integration leverages Google AI and Performance Max to help teams reach high-intent audiences across Search, YouTube, Display, and other Google properties while maintaining seamless brand consistency from ad to landing page. Early adopters, including Fried Egg Golf, You.com, and Proctor + Stevenson, report faster campaign launches and better alignment between advertising strategy and website experiences.

KOTO EVOLVES GOFUNDME'S BRAND AS PLATFORM EXPANDS BEYOND INDIVIDUAL GIVING

Global creative studio Koto has partnered with GoFundMe on a brand evolution that reflects its expansion from peer-to-peer fundraising into a broader giving ecosystem, while preserving the platform's emotional clarity and trust. Centered on the reimagined Progress Circle and supported by refined logo details, expanded colour and type systems, and updated imagery, motion, and voice, the new identity uses a single, flexible idea to create coherence across products, audiences, and experiences as GoFundMe continues to scale.

FRICTION BY DESIGN

Frictionless digital design optimizes for speed and efficiency, but removing all obstacles can eliminate awareness and meaningful decision-making. Deliberately designed friction—like confirmation pauses or undo delays—create moments of attention that respect human judgment rather than pushing machine-speed interactions. Good friction is intentional and purposeful, while bad friction wastes time without delivering value.

HOW TO FAVICON IN 2026: THREE FILES THAT FIT MOST NEEDS

Modern websites need only three favicon files instead of the typical 20+ icons: a 32×32 ICO for legacy browsers, an SVG with light/dark theme support for modern browsers, and a 180×180 PNG for Apple devices. Progressive Web Apps require two additional PNG files (192×192 and 512×512) referenced in a web manifest JSON file. This minimalist approach relies on SVG scalability and browser downscaling rather than multiple static files, eliminating outdated formats like Windows Tile icons and Safari's pinned tab icons while maintaining compatibility across all major browsers and devices.

PHOTOSHOP JUST FIXED SOME OF ITS MOST ANNOYING WORKFLOW PROBLEMS

Adobe's latest Adobe Photoshop update focuses on reducing everyday friction for working creatives, introducing proper non-destructive, maskable adjustment layers for Clarity, Dehaze, and Grain alongside quieter but meaningful workflow improvements. Upgraded Firefly-powered generative tools, more reliable reference image handling, and a new Dynamic Text beta collectively make edits cleaner, more flexible, and easier to trust in real production work without fundamentally changing how Photoshop is used.

TURN IDEAS INTO FULLY FUNCTIONAL APPS

With JDoodle AI, you can validate an idea, build a working prototype, and share it all without needing a developer or writing any code.

AI USER RESEARCH AND INTERVIEWS PLATFORM

Articos is the AI-first user research and interviews platform that delivers human-like insights in 30 minutes - powered by virtual users.

AI VIDEO GENERATOR, TEXT, AND IMAGE TO VIDEO

Generate stunning AI videos from text prompts or images in seconds. Create HD videos for social media, ads, and more.

ATOMIC DESIGN: FROM UI COMPOSITION TO REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS

Atomic Design effectively organizes UI components into atoms, molecules, and organisms, but it should serve as a composition pattern rather than a complete application architecture. When components accumulate business logic, data fetching, and state management, they become difficult to test and maintain, turning the UI into a monolith. The proposed solution separates UI composition (where Atomic Design lives) from application architecture through a feature-driven organization, with a strict rule that prevents UI components from importing domain logic or accessing business state.

HIRUKI: A DESIGN HOUSE BETTING ON EMOTION IN AN ERA OF SYSTEMS AND SCALE

HIRUKI is a newly launched design house founded by designer Julen, drawing on his experience at studios and teams including R/GA, Collins, U.N.N.A.M.E.D., Google Creative Lab, and Apple Marcom Design, and positioning itself as a collective that treats brand design as something to be felt rather than optimised. Built around small, agile teams and a philosophy rooted in emotion, context, and craft, HIRUKI prioritizes depth over speed, collaborative authorship over rigid structures, and intentional growth over scale, aiming to create brand experiences that reveal meaning, coherence, and feeling over time.

DEFY REJECTS BLACK-AND-WHITE MINIMALISM FOR GERALD'S MENSWEAR BRAND

The launch of Gerald, designed by Defy for heritage retailer Boyds, focused on inheriting standards rather than copying luxury signals, creating an affordable menswear brand that feels confident, restrained, and authentic to visually literate men aged 25–40. Led by Executive Creative Director Nik Greenblatt, the identity balances classic typography with modern discipline, a craft-rooted colour palette drawn from tailoring materials, and carefully considered physical touchpoints, positioning Gerald as an intelligent entry point into the Boyds ecosystem that has resonated strongly with customers since launch.

FLORA LAUNCHES NODE-BASED DESIGN TOOL TO UNIFY CREATIVE AI MODELS AND RAISES $42M

FLORA unifies the best creative AI models across text, image, and video into one workflow to accelerate the creative process.

THIS AI CREATIVITY STUDY SAYS YOU STILL BEAT IT, IF YOU'RE TOP TIER

A large-scale study comparing over 100,000 humans with leading AI models on creativity tasks found that some systems now outscore average participants on standardized divergent thinking tests.

HOW SMART WEARABLES ARE CHANGING THE WAY DESIGNERS TRACK PRODUCTIVITY

Smart wearables like rings and fitness trackers are becoming essential tools for designers to monitor work habits, time management, and efficiency in creative processes by providing real-time data on movement, focus, and mood.

Download now

RUST AT SCALE: AN ADDED LAYER OF SECURITY FOR WHATSAPP

WhatsApp added a layer of security for three billion users by replacing 160,000 lines of C++ with 90,000 lines of Rust. This global deployment, called Kaleidoscope, mitigates memory safety vulnerabilities in media processing. The cross-platform migration improved performance and runtime memory usage across Android, iOS, and web clients.

HOW CURSOR SHIPPED ITS CODING AGENT TO PRODUCTION

Cursor's team shipped Composer, a coding agent that completes most tasks in under 30 seconds, by solving three gnarly engineering problems: the “diff problem” (models aren't great at making clean code edits, so they trained specifically on edit trajectories and search-replace operations), compounded latency (each step in the agent loop adds delay, so they used MoE architecture, speculative decoding with draft models, and aggressive context compaction to stay fast), and sandboxing at scale (they built custom VM infrastructure to spin up thousands of isolated execution environments without the startup time becoming a bottleneck).

A FEW RANDOM NOTES FROM CLAUDE CODING QUITE A BIT LAST FEW WEEKS

Andrej Karpathy has had a rapid shift in their coding workflow, moving from 80% manual to 80% LLM agent-driven programming within weeks. While LLMs boost productivity, stamina, and project scope by handling code generation, they still produce subtle conceptual errors, overcomplicate code, and necessitate close human oversight within an IDE. Despite these flaws, the LLM-assisted workflow makes coding more enjoyable by removing drudgery and expanding engineering capabilities.

WE'RE ALL BEGINNERS AGAIN

Early AI adoption mirrors the early Python ecosystem, restoring play to programming. Since no definitive advanced standards exist, developers should embrace experimentation over legacy maintenance.

of threats in the last year. Start here

OPEN CODING AGENTS: FAST, ACCESSIBLE CODING AGENTS THAT ADAPT TO ANY REPO

Ai2 has launched Open Coding Agents, an initiative to address the limitations of existing closed and expensive coding agent systems. They are releasing SERA (Soft-verified Efficient Repository Agents), a family of strong open coding models and an accessible training method. This method significantly reduces the cost and complexity of fine-tuning powerful coding agents on private codebases, allowing small teams to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Ultimately, Ai2 aims to democratize access to agentic coding, making it more reproducible and adaptable for researchers and developers worldwide.

PRISM

OpenAI has launched Prism, a free, AI-native workspace to accelerate science writing and collaboration for researchers. Powered by GPT-5.2, this cloud-based, LaTeX-native platform integrates drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single workflow.

FROM PROMPTS TO CLICKS: SHIPPING MCP APPS IN PRODUCTION

Monday.com has successfully implemented MCP Apps, an extension to the Model Context Protocol, allowing AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to return interactive UI components directly within chat conversations. This approach enables users to "ask, see, and act" on information without leaving the chat, but it's important to only show UI selectively where seeing beats reading.

AGENTS.MD OUTPERFORMS SKILLS IN OUR AGENT EVALS

AI coding agents struggle with outdated framework knowledge, leading to incorrect code generation. Researchers from Vercel evaluated two approaches for providing current Next.js API documentation: "skills" (on-demand knowledge packages) and "AGENTS.md" (a persistent, embedded markdown file). Surprisingly, a compressed 8KB docs index embedded directly in AGENTS.md achieved a perfect 100% pass rate in their evals, outperforming skills, which only reached 79% even with explicit triggering instructions.

DOING THE THING IS DOING THE THING

Only actual execution, even if imperfect, constitutes "doing the thing," as opposed to contemplation, planning, or discussion.

CLAWDBOT RENAMES TO MOLTBOT

Clawdbot has been renamed to Moltbot due to the original name being too close to “Claude,” which is trademarked.

THE AGE OF PUMP AND DUMP SOFTWARE

A worrying new trend in 2026 is where easily generated, unmaintainable vibe-coded software is used by crypto scammers and tech FOMO for pump and dump schemes involving associated cryptocurrencies.

ONE HUMAN + ONE AGENT = ONE BROWSER FROM SCRATCH

playbook. Read the report

THE FUTURE OF AI CREATIVE TOOLS

FLORA, an AI-powered creative tool company, raised $42 million in Series A funding to give professional creatives more control over their workflows. Founder Weber Wong criticized Silicon Valley for misunderstanding creatives' needs, emphasizing the importance of taste and control in creative work. The platform's node-based interface supports companies like Nike and Lionsgate by integrating generative models into customizable workflows, enabling both manual and autonomous creation.

TRENDS I'M SEEING IN AI PRICING

AI pricing is getting harder as agents are running longer and more autonomously. People dislike usage-based billing because it is unpredictable, and per-seat pricing doesn't map cleanly to AI value. One pricing model that has prevailed in 'credit', where customers pre-purchase tokens for work. Credits will likely stick around, but they still don't make AI spend feel predictable, as agents can do wildly unpredictable amounts of work. AI products prioritizing billing observability would make AI feel more like software and less like a casino.

ENTIRE INDUSTRIES ARE NOW DECIDED IN <2 YEARS

Becoming the industry default used to take 20 years. That's how long it took for "no one gets fired for buying IBM" to become true. With AI, that timeline is under two. Harvey signed A&O Shearman when it was four people, and that one deal made it credible enough to become the default in legal AI. Landing a big customer and building industry credibility aren't separate phases - they feed each other. Most startups treat them as sequential. The ones who lock in the default do both at once.

MY 3 CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS IN EARLY-STAGE COMPANIES

Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph argues that the single biggest determinant of early-stage startup success is the team, emphasizing execution, adaptability, and persistence over product or funding. He explains that talent operates on a power curve and shares practical advice on attracting and retaining exceptional people, including hiring for future impact, cutting toxic high performers, and treating employees with trust and honesty.

MANAGEMENT AS AI SUPERPOWER

An experimental class at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated how management and AI tools like Claude Code and ChatGPT can accelerate startup development. Students rapidly created diverse prototypes by leveraging AI for market research, financial modeling, and ideation, effectively cutting down traditional startup timelines. Successful delegation to AI hinges on balancing task complexity, AI success probability, and evaluation time, emphasizing the value of management skills in optimizing AI productivity.

FORUMS

AI-powered Q&A for GitHub repositories that clones and analyzes codebases to deliver source-backed answers to developer questions.

DEMONSTRATE BY NOTTE

Browser automation platform that records tasks and generates production-ready automation code for deployment and scheduling.

ELEVEN LABS STARTUP GRANTS (RESOURCE)

12 months of free Eleven Labs credits if you are an early-stage startup.

IS YOUR MARGIN MY OPPORTUNITY IN SOFTWARE?

AWS's operating margins ranged between 25% to 38% between 2015 and 2025. The company prints money at scale even after a decade of cloud commoditization. Its moat is capex, and few other companies have the balance sheet to compete. AWS outspends on data centers, while most companies outspend on sales teams.

FORWARD-DEPLOYED JOB TITLES

Palantir renamed its solutions engineers to "Forward-Deployed Engineers" and called them Deltas, like Delta Force. It sounded ridiculous but worked brilliantly. The role attracted high-agency, high-EQ engineers who might otherwise have seen client-facing work as beneath them. The title gave the work prestige, and Palantir got a hiring moat. Now, Harvey is doing the same thing with "legal engineer." The test for whether this is real or just title inflation: does the new title describe work that would have been unrecognizable five years ago? "Prompt engineer" already feels dated because the work turned out to be a feature of every job rather than a job itself.

VERTICAL SAAS IS LOSING THE THING THAT MADE IT VERTICAL

Much of modern vertical SaaS has devolved into lightly rebranded horizontal software.

AVERAGE DILUTION PER STAGE, IMPROVE NET IRR WITH CAPITAL RECYCLING

New research from AngelList on dilution benchmarks and how fund distributions actually work.

WHO DOES THE SERIES B?

The growth in VC funds has necessitated larger exits.