We put together a V1 Handbook for how to design and build large-scale websites. Grounded in our work on countless websites for large organizations like like Sweetgreen, Palantir, Galaxy, Color, Ogilvy, Glossier, Bose, Samsung, and Microsoft. Hope you find it useful.

"Let's take a group photo."

I am excited to start talking more publicly about what we've been building! Idle is a space where you gather people to actually do the things the group cares about. idle.space

It was pointed out that I write an essay in support of creative directors in new types of organizations every year or so. There’s 3 reasons for this. 1 - WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN AN IDEA, REPEAT IT. Too often folks are looking for the next idea. Push an idea to its extreme end to see how strong it actually is. That’s how ideas resonate, and that’s how you actually test your own conceptual ability 2 - I BELIEVE IN CREATIVES HAVING POSITIONS OF POWER. Bringing creatives into institutions they wouldn’t typically see themselves promoted the liberal arts belief of interdisciplinary thinking AND impact. The problem is that there’s a type of “creative technologist” that always wants to critique power and are comfortable with not having it. It keeps them and their practice “pure”. And allows for a sort of meta discourse outside of the organizations of consequence. This to me is a tragedy. 3 - I BELIEVE IN RICH CREATIVES AND THAT EVERY ORGANIZATION CAN BE MORE CREATIVE. with each of these pieces two things always happens. One, Creatives outside of tech reach out to see “is it true I can do a job like that”. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have helped outsiders change their economic lives forever. And two, organizations reach out to find the types of folks that can have creative impact.

I sometimes just pour milk into cereal.

I built something cool. aenternet.com I'm gonna post instructions on how to build your own, but first a post mortem and gentle warning on why this is just a prototype instead of a full launch for Svrf. Aenternet FKA Svrf is a library of my favorite links, 10k+ imported from my favorites on x, youtube, tumblr, instagram, etc then sorted into style clusters. It's very cool to see my own tastes and patterns reflected back at me from a giant database of my own history, like a snapshot of the centroid of my soul, all these beautiful links point back to ME, somehow. My intent was to launch this as a new ffffound or pinterest that anyone could use with their own bookmarks to see a library mirror of themselves, but the closer I've gotten to launch the more hesitant I've become to launch a community I love with AI, tech that I don't understand and will never be able to control or afford independently. It would not be responsible of me to launch on top of openai or anthropic without access to independent wealth or secret intentions of an exit. There are three possible ends for any funded startup: Failure, Acquisition, IPO. Do I think Ænternet could IPO, and would I want to enforce the growth necessary on the product to achieve it? Let's be real, this is an art house project with no business tapping into enterprise growth resources. Growth is expensive. AI is expensive. I've burned through member fees and more getting this far with zero users. What happens if it gets popular, the bills run heavy and deep pockets start to show interest? Yes I could raise a seed but that's just kicking the can. Do I just build something I love and sell it off like Svpply? No I will be avoiding that nightmare again thank you. Building with AI is a bit like inviting a dark wizard onto your founding team, they conjure miracles at great expense and will always have ambitions that supersede your own. So instead of launching this version, I am backing up and starting over again. I know what to do, it's going to be great, and barebones. Deeply frustrated to be looping like this but so it goes. /// end warning and post mortem /// Thank you for your time and attention and I hope some of this was useful and that you find Ænternet as beautiful of a failure as I do! I'm embarrassed to add but I will anyway: learning how to build with AI has been both a joy and an act of desperation in an effort to keep pace with the industry. I am literally an old dog learning new tricks. I've always been a great brand and product designer (sorry), but now I'm a great designer who can brand, build and deploy most any kind of consumer software. I would really like to be hired to do some hard work on a hard problem ideally with large libraries of data that need to be figured out. I've had quite a bit of practice doing this with both client and personal work in the last months and I want to keep doing it. At some point I'll tail with a bunch of process screenshots. DIY instructions to follow in a QT.

"I remember when it was called machine learning." is quickly becoming the way to pretend you were early to AI.

What about this one?

This feels like an accelerating trend. I guess "taste" is just copying.

Rebranding to Halfpipe.

Apple has reportedly been working on an AI Steve Jobs to come back replace Tim Cook. Will be interesting to see what an AI reality distortion field is like.

where it's due:

One group came up with something novel. Others are copying it. At least give the credit where credit is due.

8VC and Browserbase will be partnering for our 5th iteration of design film night next thursday to show Akira! excited for us to show the pivatol movie that paved the way for so many other cyberpunk films. dm @liammatteson @DrCapsoul or i for an invite! cover art by: @DrCapsoul

Free Agency Season 3: Ideas matter. An eight-week ideas residency in our New York office. Summer 2026. Select, refine, and pressure-test a startup idea before you start the company. Applications now open.

FREE AGENCY SEASON THREE is coming soon, this time from Terrain’s New York office. Free Agency is an 8-week idea residency w/ resources, workshops, and 1:1 partnership to select and pressure-test your idea. More details to come. Apply early here: terrain.com/application

They didn't just do this round. They backed the Seed round 13 years ago. A great non-consensus bet by Craig / Collaborative Fund.

allow me to present... 💫 WE ALL MAKE a PLATFORMER 💫 play it now: wamp.land I AM SO EXCITED TO SEE WHAT YOU ALL BUILD. read more about it or watch my explainer video👇

Silicon Valley has been engineering-led for so long, they've forgotten what Brand really is. Gokul: "Brand is no longer a strong moat." Harry: "I thought brand was the most important as technology commoditizes things." Gokul: "I slightly disagree because..." and then he goes on to describe how software will be commoditized right down to pixel by pixel copying. The industry still sees Brand as what something looks like. A shiny coat of paint. The companies that truly understand brand will be the ones to survive in a world where anyone can build or copy anything.

THE BLEAKNESS OF THE BRAND AGE... PG’s essays on builders and innovation are some of the clearest thinking about the startup world. They are essential. But when he writes about art and design, he tends to apply an engineer's lens that flattens the subject. In this piece he frames design as something to solve and brand as something like the decorative facade constructed when real innovation runs out... He goes on that at the end of golden ages we are met with a bleak reality that the hollowness of brand is all we can compete on. Early industries compete on technological advancement. Later, when products become indistinguishable, companies compete on brand. He frames it as a cosmetic layer applied to otherwise solved problems. He makes a similar move in his essay How Art Can Be Good, resolving artistic quality as something judged objectively by an audience rather than as personal expression (I find this take particularly jarring given his background studying painting at RISD, one of the more intuitively-driven art schools.). The premise assumes that the only meaningful axis of improvement is technical performance. Once precision, efficiency, or cost reach a plateau, the remaining differentiation is treated as superficial, or worse, as a distortion. But value rarely evolves that way... In most product categories, value tends to evolve in layers. At first, the question is functional: does it work at all? Then it becomes experiential: how well does it work, and how does it feel to use? Eventually the frontier becomes cultural: what does this object express, and who does it belong to? Engineering dominates the first phase. Design often shapes the second. Brand emerges in the third, when products begin to carry shared meaning. As industries mature, competition shifts toward these cultural and human needs: what identity a product signals, what kind of world it helps create. As makers, we start by solving the functional problem. Over time the work moves up the ladder of human needs. Those dimensions are often symbolic rather than purely functional, but they are not trivial. They are where design often differentiates. PG is right that brand can become hollow: his account of Patek Philippe cynically creating an asset bubble through artificial scarcity is convincing, and the "comb-over effect" of individually rational steps producing something freakish is well observed (see: Richard Mille). But he makes the mistake of treating this endpoint as the definition of brand itself. Brand at its best is not manufactured scarcity or centrifugal weirdness. It is what happens when product, design, and point of view become coherent to people and begin to signal shared meaning. The watch example he builds the entire essay around actually illustrates the shift. Once quartz solved the problem of precision, watches didn't become irrelevant, their significance as cultural objects was enhanced. They became artifacts of craftsmanship, history, identity, and taste. The engineering problem was solved, but the human one remained. PG sees this transition and concludes that the remaining activity is empty. A designer sees it and recognizes a different kind of problem being solved. His strongest claim, that branding is “centrifugal” while design is “centripetal,” deserves a direct response. It's true that good design often converges. But convergence on what exactly? PG assumes it converges on functional optima: the thinnest case, the most accurate movement. Design converges on human optima: on how something communicates, on the relationship between an object and the person holding it. Brian Eno (whose writing on creative practice is akin to PG’s for startups) has a useful frame here called axis thinking. Most fields get stuck optimizing along a single axis, and the real leap comes from shifting to a different axis entirely. That's what happens when watches move from precision to cultural meaning. It's moving to a different center. That center is just as real, even if it can't be measured with a chronometer. When PG writes that “there's no function for form to follow” in the brand age, he's defining function too narrowly. Expressing identity, signaling values, triggering emotions, these are very real functions. They're just not engineering functions. If his interpretation were correct, if everything beyond technical performance were decorative, whole domains of human creation would stop making sense. Why design new chairs once ergonomics are understood? Why design new garments when we have ones that work perfectly well? Why open new restaurants when we already know how to cook? The answer is that these fields serve a hierarchy of needs that extends well beyond the functional, and the work of addressing those higher needs is not lesser work. This matters now more than it has in decades. As AI compresses the cost of building software toward zero, we are entering a new version of the quartz crisis: one that affects nearly every product built on code. PG's framework would predict that what follows is a rather bleak brand age: superficial differentiation over commoditized technology. But if value evolves in layers, what actually follows is a design age, a period where the human dimensions of product become the primary frontier. When done well, design, taste, point of view, brand, and cultural meaning won't be regarded as decoration applied after the engineering is done, but rather be the work that matters most. Engineering solves problems. Design and brand determine what those solutions mean to people.

If you are thinking about / working with AI you just have to watch @frank_chimero's absolutely fantastic Kinference talk.