π€ Design Meets Code #4
A post by Louis Shulman caught my eye this week about the hidden benefits of sharing content consistently.
Every week, digging back through my design, code and online business bookmarks, picking what's worth your time, and connecting the dots between different ideas β it all sharpens my own thinking and understanding.
As Louis puts it: "The greatest return from publishing content isn't publishing, it's the work involved in creation." For me, it's the work of curation, of staying curious, of keeping my eye on the trends of what matters in design and development. Each newsletter becomes a snapshot of our industry's evolution, forcing me to reflect more deeply about where we're headed.
Now, here's what caught my eye this week:
My top picks of the week:
π₯ Codeium's Windsurf is making waves as the new "agentic IDE" that could dethrone Cursor, with developers praising its superior codebase understanding and seamless AI flows that "feel like magic".
π₯ The data from 2.5 million sign-ins shows that Sign in with Google is the fastest and most popular authentication method (3.86 seconds, 65% usage), followed by traditional passwords (7.22 seconds, 27%), while "Magic Links" are the slowest and least used option (56.85 seconds, 1.6% usage), demonstrating Clerk's success in guiding developers toward more efficient authentication strategies.
π₯ Reloom has introduced a new AI-powered style guide builder feature that allows users to transform wireframes into complete design concepts with automated color palettes and typography, which can be customized, compared, and shared with clients before exporting to Figma or Webflow.
Development picks
π Stripe launched a new agent toolkit that lets AI applications handle payments and financial services directly, integrating with major frameworks like Vercel AI SDK, LangChain and CrewAI to enable automated billing, payments, and virtual card generation for AI workflows.
π Framer Motion is now Motion - Popular animation library goes independent as "Motion", expanding beyond React to serve all web developers from its new motion.dev home.
π In 30 min, learn how to handle permissions/authorization - ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) evaluates 4 elements for permissions: Who is doing it? (subject), What are they doing? (action), What are they doing it to? (resource), and What's the context? (environment) - way more flexible than just checking roles.
π You can build iOS apps with Cursor and Claude AI even as a beginner
π 5 techniques to build gradients on the Web
Design picks
π Reimagining prototyping with AI - Companies used to skip prototyping due to time constraints, but AI now turns written descriptions into functional prototypes in seconds, revolutionizing how products are validated before launch.
π Design tokens: authoring vs consuming - We've been doing tokens wrong! They should work like a CMS database with unique IDs, not fancy hierarchical variables.
π DesignSystems.com - guides, articles, design ops tips, Figma resources.
π How designers are using AI images in their client work
π Figma updates their eyedropper tool which now can grab much more than just a color value
π Final Cut Pro 11 introduces AI-powered features like Magnetic Mask for subject isolation and Transcribe to Captions, plus native spatial video editing support for Apple Vision Pro, also enhanced iPad features and Final Cut Camera updates for iPhone 16 Pro.
π A new UI styling trend. What should we call it though?
Business picks
π My buddy Tomas discovered Polar.sh, a developer-focused payment platform and Merchant of Record (MoR) that handles all the global tax/VAT complexities for you. It lets you monetize everything from private GitHub repos to Discord access in minutes, with built-in analytics and issue funding β all while charging zero monthly fees. They take 4% + 40Β’ per transaction, which is reasonable compared to competitors.
π How two founders at Tally turned "boring" forms into $150K MRR by going against every SaaS playbook: unlimited free tier, no feature bloat, and a text-based builder that designers actually enjoy using.
π Complete hiring system built without code in Notion, using new connected workflows - Sites, Forms, Databases, Charts, Layouts, Automations and Mail.
Quote of the week
Talking is faster than typing.
Reading is faster than listening.
AI bridges the gap
β Sahil Lavingia
That's it for this week!
Found something useful? Got cool stuff to share? I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line β your finds might make it into next week's issue.
If you know someone who'd like this too, feel free to pass it along!
Stay curious,
Edgaras