A good prototype can illustrate product vision, prove technical feasibility, let you experience the journey, and evoke emotion through UI design and animation – all at once. A slide deck can usually only do one of these well before it starts diluting the narrative or disappearing into the weeds. Prototypes don’t just explain – they persuade.

2025 was a proper roller coaster. It started quite depressingly with Normally going insolvent and ended on a super high – I designed, built and shipped more than I thought was remotely possible – agents, children's finance, evidence platform, AI in drug discovery, and government trust work.

Speculation time! Are LLMs with their chain-of-thought capabilities opening the door to a new disruption – Capability as a Service? Imagine Siri accessing your company's API directly, no app installation required.

Most engineers now use AI at work, half have incorporated it in applications. From code-writing assistants to knowledge searching, reviewing code, and creating content or graphics for documentation, AI has woven itself into our workflows seamlessly.

Platforms that bring a simplified, more delightful developer experience are becoming the preferred way of hosting web applications.

Front-end Frameworks and UI Libraries Have Commoditised UX & UI Design

Pretty much everyone is now using one of the modern declarative, component-based front-end frameworks and UI libraries. But here’s the flip side: as frameworks and libraries continue to democratise good design, the distinctiveness of apps and services is slowly being lost.

Over the last 10 years, there has been a huge expansion of javascript AI/ML libraries that enable embedding AI into client-side bundles and serverless functions and cater for various use cases. This article lists a few of the ones I found most useful by their uses.

While decidedly technical, the new updates showcased are making it easier and easier to create great and performant user experiences with Nuxt without needing to spend hours on boilerplate, configurations or event handlers. By combining these with a powerful LLM, I believe many non-coding designers might start tipping their toes in the prototyping with code water. I’m very excited about what this future holds.

This Christmas, I crafted a hybrid escape room experience for my parents, blending real-world challenges with a touch of AI magic. Imagine a gift not just wrapped in paper, but wrapped in a journey through AI-driven puzzles and digital enigmas.

Building prototypes and apps is fun. Dealing with certificates and provisioning admin is not. I've written this guide for anyone going through the same frustrations as me, trying to package up, code-sign, notarize and share a Vue.js + Electron.js app on a Mac-os (Ventura 13.3). I hope it helps.