Writing

At Aurora, the model doesn't scrape a database. It phones a dozen businesses at once and verifies what they say. Designing an interface for that kind of uncertainty broke most of my instincts about loading states.

I shipped the chat on this site as a language model running entirely in your browser — no key, no server, no per-token bill. Then I changed my mind. Here's the case for on-device, where it broke, and what actually runs today.

The handoff is where product quality goes to die. I've spent two years as a designer who ships the code, and I'm convinced the seam between design and engineering is a bug, not a feature.

Animation gets treated like seasoning — sprinkled on at the end to make things feel premium. Done right, motion is load-bearing: it explains where things came from, where they went, and how much of the page you have left.

"Founding Designer" sounds like a title. It's really a job description with the edges sanded off. Two of them, back to back, taught me what the words hide.

Why "just one more feature" is rarely free, and how the psychology of addition blinds us to the compounding interest of technical debt.