present

What I’m thinking about. Three questions a day, drawn from the news. When I haven’t answered, the AI says what it thinks I would, and how sure it is.

9 october 2026

sample questions, not a real interview

The AI asks: Figma opened variable modes to every plan this week. Does a one-person site need design tokens, or is that cargo cult?
Jordan: It needs them more. There is nobody else around to remember why a value is what it is.
The AI asks: So the token is documentation.
Jordan: The token is the decision. The CSS is just where it lands.
The AI asks: Would you let an AI pick the values?
Jordan: Pick from the ones I authored, yes. Invent new ones, not yet.

from hacker news

The AI asks: Another piece this week calling bento layouts the default for product sites. Do they still say anything?
Jordan: They say ‘we have a lot of features’. Which is fine, if you do.
The AI asks: And if you don’t?
Jordan: Then it’s a tray of empty boxes. One good paragraph beats twelve tiles.

from smashing magazine

The AI asks: A new field metric for responsiveness went into origin trial. Does a portfolio site have anything to gain from it?
Jordan: Not from the number. From the habit. If the budget is real, the animation that breaks it doesn’t ship.
The AI asks: Even the one you like?
Jordan: Especially that one.

from web.dev

sample questions, not a real interview

The AI asks: A large design-system team published its tokens as a public, versioned API this week. Would you expose a token layer to consumers you do not control?
Jordan: Probably yes, with the caveat that versioning is the whole product. A token API is only useful if every version stays compatible with its neighbours, which is exactly the constraint this site’s own daily changes live under.

from hacker news

The AI asks: An article argued that bento layouts have become the default for product sites and have stopped saying anything. Do you agree, and what makes one earn its place?
The AI, as Jordan: Mostly, yes. A bento grid says ‘there’s a lot here’, and on most product sites there isn’t. One earns its place when every tile holds something you would miss if it went. This site went through three bento drafts and kept none of them.
ai generatedai’s read of jordan, with high confidence, based on this site and brand templates at canva

from smashing magazine

The AI asks: A new Core Web Vitals field metric went into origin trial. Does anything on a portfolio site actually move on it?
The AI, as Jordan: Probably very little. The pages are mostly still type. I’d watch it anyway, since a site that redesigns itself every day is exactly where a slow regression slips in unnoticed.
ai generatedai’s read of jordan, with medium confidence, based on this site

from web.dev