I think building apps and websites for other people is mad depressing. It went from "move this up there, and change that colour to pink" to a client ruining a beautiful site by using a nocode tool. Now they have superpowers to ruin it by adding AI generated code as well. AI can generate absolutely beautiful code if it is generated on the right architecture with the right patterns and rules. The problem isn't the AI it's the people telling AI and developers what to do.
Hello. I was delighted to see Penpot get a lot of traction when Adobe were going to buy Figma. I'm not a fan of Adobe because they killed so many of my favourite products. I switched from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) Fireworks to Sketch to Figma and probably would have moved from Figma to Penpot already but I simply don't need Figma anymore. I use Shadcn UI and Claude Code to do my design these days without every having to touch Figma. All I need is a lightweight image editor that can crop and optimise some vectors and bitmaps now and again. I'd like if I had a lightweight design system that syncs designs with my code and the code with my design but I don't really need it. It looks like you are building something like this. Your MCP should be more usable with the new Claude Opus model and their new advanced tool use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use but it would be useful to package that functionality into a tool that can call servers without needing MCP. Then I would give it to my Claude Code design subagent without worrying about it polluting my context window. I took the time to write this because I really like what you are trying to do and your new Open Nitrate business model is wonderful. I wish you lots of luck. If you ever want to chat about AI feel free to get in touch at tony@one.ie
Thanks for you comment! I might reach out to you for some AI chat, sure! Can I ask you a question? What's the size of your team, the team uses Shadcn UI and Claude Code?
See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.
You can make your website run fast as well with https://astro.build - it strips the Javascript and uses HTML until js is needed. You can get 300ms page loads for outcrop.app with Astro on Cloudflare Pages. Good luck with the project. I requested early access - You should use the response to the form submit requesting access better - I mean somebody who added their email expressed a lot of intent - why end the conversation with a toast notification? I hope life is going well in Dublin.
I know a juggler who was frustrated as he didn't have "natural" skills at juggling despite being born into a circus family.
He was good at drawing, so one day he took drawing classes. He realized that the class just repeated everything he learned on his own.
It clicked that he was a "natural" at art and not at juggling. What natural skill meant was simply coming to the right techniques early on compared to other people who might need years to discover the same thing.
He eventually became a really good juggler, by interviewing other "naturals" and reverse engineering how they got there (they just practiced better). Most naturals don't even realize what they're doing right or what others are doing wrong. When naturals do classes, they're sometimes not even that helpful.
Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.
Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.
I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.
Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.
The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.
Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.
Do you want free email for multiple addresses on multiple domains with all the features of a Gmail? Just setup Cloudflare to manage your email, create rules to forward to regular Gmail accounts, which you can configure to send email from your domains. 100% free.
just forwarding is great if you can afford losing mail. Gmail will drop your messages occasionally.
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
