[Weekly Retro] They are counting on you

#282 - Jun.2026

Happy Friday!

Here is a quick idea for the weekend:

1 in 6 people in the world has a significant disability. Life expectancy is rising. Billions are coming online for the first time.

These are all users. And they're counting on you to think about them when you design.

Universal design is the discipline of constantly asking: who am I leaving out?

You do this by practicing empathy. Not the type of empathy of putting "yourself in others' shoes". By putting "yourself" in, you bring your own biases and perceptions with you.

You need clean lenses. The type of empathy where you remove "yourself" and try to really look through the user's eyes. You imagine "their" biases and perceptions.

That's a very different thing.

⛑️ Interesting framework

Yet as agents become capable of doing work that once required a person or even a team, the cost of not deploying grows large enough that the risk-reward calculation tips heavily toward adoption, as long as products can be made safe. The engineering question becomes how to cap the blast radius.

Patterns for containing agents:

• The ephemeral container
• The human-in-the-loop sandbox
• The local VM

Source: How we contain Claude across products

🗺️ Assorted links of cool articles I found during the week

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

The AtlanticTed Chiang

The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)

When Clarke Speicher (spike-er) asked how I liked the screen adaptation of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s novella following the solitary logger Robert Granier in the early 20th-century American West…

Literary HubJulien C. Levy

The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

How AI has changed the way I prototype, plan, and ship; and what I’m doing to keep my hands dirty.

Daryl Cecile

Choosing to Stay Human

If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:

One Useful ThingEthan Mollick

🖋️ Quote of the week

“A lovely blend: Always reaching. Already enough.” — James Clear

César Rodríguez
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