Roger Wong

I made the Comic-Con schedule app for myself (and any interested nerds). With AI, anyone can DIY software just for their own needs or a small community. Full newsletter here: open.substack.com/pub/lunarboy...

Holy shit. Using the Compound Engineering plugin and Fable, I planned out an iPad port of my app this morning. Then before dinner, kicked off Codex on the goal of implementing it. 4 hours later, it’s alive!!!!

Trying out Codex in the terminal… I'm sorry, but Claude Code is more beautiful and considered. Maybe I'm just used to it, but Codex feels very unfinished from a UI standpoint.

Working on something kind of fun. The @sandiegocomic-con.bsky.social schedule is notoriously terrible. With nearly 3,500 events over 5 days and 51 rooms/venues, it's an information nightmare. SDCC's app and site aren't great. So I decided on Friday to see if I can make a better one. #sdcc2026

My god this is real.

Designers and PMs are writing markdown files like DESIGN.md or SOUL.md for their agents. The files hold what used to live in our heads as taste. New newsletter: newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/out-of-you...

You ever get the feeling that Claude Opus 4.7 was trained only on Willam Gibson novels?

Spent Sunday afternoon with Claude Design working on my cousin's preschool site. First draft: B-. Four dozen micro-tweaks later: A. The tool gave me a head start. Taste did the rest. rogerwong.me/2026/04/sund...

Gen X gets forgotten AGAIN. Thanks @wsj.com www.wsj.com/personal-fin...

When factories got electric motors in the 1880s, they swapped the steam engine and changed nothing else. For 30 years, output barely moved. Most teams are doing the same thing with AI. I wrote more about this: newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-factory-hasnt-been-redesigned

Designers, we’re in the messy middle stuck between two ends. Do you defend “designer” as a role or follow the skill of design? I explore this in my latest newsletter.

The design profession got exactly what it asked for: less time pushing pixels, more room for strategy. Most of us are using that time to argue about what designers should be instead. newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-territ...

Jenny Wen’s "ship fast, iterate publicly, build trust through speed" approach makes sense for Anthropic. They're building greenfield AI products where nobody knows the right interaction patterns yet.

In case you’re looking to switch chatbots, say from a four-syllable one to a single-syllable one: claude.com/import-memory

Wow. LOL

I thought the same thing. This might be the inflection point and NOT “AI-washing” as in the earlier layoffs from Amazon, Meta, etc.

Best thing I heard today: “Claude Code is gaslighting me.” 🤣

Just published a new newsletter wrapping up the theme of last week. Design is changing fast due to the new AI tools. Bleeding edge Silicon Valley companies have already made the shift. Our days of drawing pictures of designs to be implemented are numbered.

Everywhere I look, there’s a new ASCII project. I think it’s sort of a halo effect from Claude Code and the nostalgia designers and developers have for terminals. Anyway, I wrote a roundup of stuff that’s caught my eye. #designsky

Designers vibe-coding these days...

I’ve been thinking about what actually makes someone good at their job. Not competent, but good. The kind of good where you look at a screen and know something is off before you can articulate why. The kind where you can tell a product decision is wrong from across the room. #designsky

After writing about Wall Street + SaaS, I found a few pieces that pulled on that thread to something forward-looking. - Shawn Smith on how Salesforce is in trouble - Charlie Warren on what he calls “Vertical AI 2.0” - Eli Dukes on the new moat: data recipes - Duncan Grazier on the next AI platform

Zapier and IFTTT were supposed to "kill the software giants." They didn't. Instead, the system integration market grew to $410B by 2024. Similarly, in 2000, I worked on Sega.com and our agency charged $1M for the design+build. Today, a Shopify site costs $39/mo. But the market has grown to $47B.