The Pinion Dispatch
The Agent Holds the Spec Pen
AI agents are writing the brief, fetching the references, and shipping the layout. The designer's chair is being quietly rearranged.
You've been saving the proof. An agent writes design specs like a senior, another pulls 257k screens via MCP, a Chrome extension copies the live web, a filter studio authors tools from a sentence. The craft hasn't vanished — it's moved up a layer, into the prompt. Designers who won't learn the harness are the new ones who can't open the file.
Shader Folk, Still in the Workshop
Threejs fluid sims, CRT phosphor decay, stained glass cellular automata, voxel engines that emit SVG. The creative-coding crowd hasn't moved to agents — it's still hand-tuning the pixels.
Letters Are the Last War
Apple's Liquid Glass composer drops its SVGs, font-pairing tools multiply, Cheng Lou crawls back from somewhere unpleasant to remind us UI starts with the glyph. Type is where craft hides.
The Polish Tax, Automated
Anime.js gains scrambleText. React ships view transitions. A thinking indicator is two lines of math. Dithered shadows, dot-pattern hovers, ASCII shaders — interaction is the new surface area.