G'day, I'm Brody MacLean, a multi-disciplinary design leader from Sydney, Australia. :-)

Excited to share my latest project, Oil, a visually appealing dark theme designed for clarity — enhancing the coding & productivity experience with a well-thought-out colour palette.

Enjoy high-contrast text for effortless eye relaxation across VS Code, Cursor, iTerm2, Ghostty, Slack, Raycast and more coming soon.

AI safety researcher quits Anthropic, warning that ‘the world is in peril’ and moves to study poetry.

When an Anthropic safety lead says ‘the world is in peril’ and walks away, maybe we should listen.

The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.

The green LED was replaced by a white one, but “pulsating light indicates that the computer is sleeping” buried the nicest part of it – the animation was designed to mimic human breathing at 12 breaths per minute, and feel comforting and soothing.

WDYT?

I got a Slack message the other week, just “What do you think?” with a link to a Notion document.

No context or indication of what this person actually believed. Just a link and a question mark.

I stared at it for a minute, trying to decide if I was annoyed or just tired (both, probably).

What’s this message is actually saying is: “I haven’t figured this out yet and I’d like you to do the thinking for me.”

Product design is fundamentally changing as AI shifts the focus from Figma mockups to code-based orchestration and machine-readable systems, elevating the designer’s role in visible, user-facing quality that automation can’t fully replicate

Design leads spend about 80% of their time on communication, alignment, and justification. Not on hands-on design work. Every design decision carries a “justification tax”: the time spent explaining, documenting, and defending choices that other disciplines make in a quick conversation.

AI should be targeting that 80%, not the mockup work. Use it to synthesise meeting notes, draft stakeholder communications, generate research summaries, and build quick prototypes that settle debates with data instead of opinions.

Every product reaches a point where it becomes too complex to be useful in order to meet the needs of the business.

The biggest problem is that product teams are incentivised to add more features, not to improve the foundations of the product, so it’s impressive, at Slacks trajectory in 2020, that they were self-aware enough to identify and address things from the ground up.

We found ourselves shipping a kitchen drawer full of useful tools to our customers – knives and forks, spatulas and whisks, tongs and corkscrews, hell even a few citrus zesters and melon ballers – but everything was so jammed together that you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Look out for the mandolin in the back.

It was a mess. We were at a tipping point of product complexity. While we were preoccupied re-engineering our codebase into a scalable service and reorganizing our company into a public-ready business, our product had suffered. Inertia, complexity, and feature creep had caught up to us. Entropy was setting in.

A ton of stuff here applies to Design and Product too.

Ian Tracey discusses the evolving landscape of software engineering, emphasising a “K-shaped” future where some skills become increasingly valuable while others diminish.