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Writing, watching, listening, and thinking about Zero-Vector Design.

Related EssayThe Napoleon Express
March 23, 2026
The Napoleon Express
People in every era confuse the delivery mechanism with the purpose; the real purpose is getting meaning to the person who needs it.

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Erika Flowers on Substack

New writing on design, AI, building things, and the evolution of Zero-Vector practice. The primary channel for everything new.

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Conversations about design, AI, building, and the people doing the work. Long-form discussions, live builds, and deep dives.

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Articles

Substack
A Good Craftsperson Never Blames Their Tools
On the relationship between the maker and the instrument.
Substack
The 20 Rules for AI-First Design
The foundational rules for working in a Zero-Vector paradigm.
Substack
Across the Designer-Verse: The Reality of AI-First Design
What it actually looks like to design with AI agents.
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Out of the Crisis: Convergent Evolution and AI-First Design
How the design industry got here and why the convergence is inevitable.

Recommended Reading

Book
Out of the Crisis
W. Edwards Deming — The original systems thinker. Quality is not about inspection.
Book
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman — The foundation. Affordances, signifiers, mapping. Always relevant.
Book
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows — If you do not understand feedback loops, you cannot design with agents.
Book
Blue Ocean Strategy
W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne — Find the uncontested market space. Mandatory for problem framing.
Book
Save the Cat!
Blake Snyder — Story structure applies to product structure. The arc is the arc.

Videos & Talks

video
Build Your First App with AI Agents
Live hackathon: building a real application from scratch with AI agents.
podcast
The Claude Code Messiah
Deep dive into the tool that made Zero-Vector Design practical.
podcast
NN/g -- The Future of Service Design in the Age of AI
With Nielsen Norman Group, on what AI means for design.

People to Follow

Other voices exploring the intersection of design, AI, and building.

Ethan Mollick
Wharton professor, author of Co-Intelligence. The most rigorous thinker on what AI actually changes about work.
Simon Willison
Developer, datasette creator. Prolific builder and documenter of what is actually possible with LLMs right now.
Maggie Appleton
Designer and anthropologist. Thinks deeply about how interfaces shape understanding.
Andrej Karpathy
Former Tesla AI lead, OpenAI founding member. Explains AI from first principles.
Swyx
Builder, writer, community leader. Latent Space podcast covers the AI engineering frontier.

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Where To Start Read the Philosophy

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