This week has been exhausting. One breakthrough announcement after another. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

This was one of those weeks.

First we got Codex from OpenAI. Then Google I/O. Then OpenAI announces they acquired io (savage move) and are joining forces with Sir Jony Ive. Then Anthropic drops Claude 4.

It’s too damn much. I’m losing sleep just trying to stay on top of all these tectonic shifts happening in tech.

And frankly, you should be too. Designers: we’ve been given superpowers. Abilities to build anything we dream of with the help of our super intelligent AI friends.

If only there was a design tool making advancements at the rate of these foundation models. Well, that’s where Paper steps in...

From design to live in seconds.

Focus on what it looks like live, we’ll do the rest. Publish your design as a live site in seconds. Hit publish, and your site is instantly live worldwide on state-of-the-art hosting. Need to upgrade something? Just as fast.

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Watch the interview here 👇

Paper is built for getting design work done.

What I really appreciate about Paper is Stephen’s genuine commitment to keeping designers locked in and focused. Every designer knows the pain of command-tabbing between apps and getting distracted by Twitter or Slack along the way. Paper's seamless canvas—combining powerful editing, animations, and React elements - is thoughtfully crafted to help us stay in that coveted flow state.

One of the things that stood out most to me in chatting with Stephen was how intentional the Paper team is about integrating AI. Instead of shoving every trendy AI feature into the product just to look cool, they're being super thoughtful about how AI can genuinely empower designers without overwhelming us. I love that they're making sure we stay in control, using AI as a helpful partner - not a replacement for creativity.

Maybe my favorite takeaway from talking with Stephen is knowing that Paper is built by a small team of real designers. They're obsessing over little details like color pickers, gradients, and simplifying those overly complicated design systems we all secretly dread. It's obvious they deeply understand (and actually care about) the real-world challenges we designers face every single day.

👉 A quick favor

1. Watch: Meet the Man Taking on Figma - Stephen Haney, Paper

2. Subscribe: New designer-turned-founder chats drop 4x a month—pure signal.

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4 & Opus 4—Anthropic’s mic-drop

Anthropic is back with a duet: Sonnet 4 slots in as the new default fast model, while Opus 4 now tops SWE-Bench and long-form reasoning charts, out-coding and out-reading the previous champ by ~15 points.

Early testers say Opus now feels “human-quality” in narrative writing and produces shockingly coherent 2k-line patches without hallucinating package names. If Codex is the tireless junior, Opus is the staff engineer who also moonlights as your copy-writer.

Framer

Framer humbly destroys Webflow (sorry 🤷‍♂️)

Framer just detonated its Spring Event confetti cannon and four shiny features spilled out: Wireframer (an AI layout genie that spits out skeletal, responsive pages in seconds), Workshop (a code-savvy copilot that turns “make this navbar sticky” into working React), a fully rebuilt Vector editor that feels like Pen Tool crossed with nitrous, and finally Analytics 2.0—click-tracking plus A/B funnels baked right into the canvas so you can celebrate (or mourn) your bounce rate without leaving the tool.

Koen Bok framed it as “short-circuiting the slog from blank page to live site,” but really it’s Framer yelling designers deserve CMD-N for entire websites. 

OpenAI

Sir Jony Ive joins OpenAI (yes, really)

OpenAI bought Ive’s design studio LoveFrom spin-off “Io” for a cool ~$6.5 Billion, and handed the former Apple legend the keys to its first hardware moonshot.

Altman’s stated goal: ditch the smartphone form factor entirely and build an “external brain” that ChatGPTs its way through your day. Cue the hot takes comparing it to Humane’s flop—but when the guy who sketched the iPhone bevels meets the company that made ChatGPT, you at least clear your calendar for the launch livestream.

Inflight

Inflight launches the feedback clubhouse designers actually want

Inflight popped out of stealth with the promise of “your new home for design feedback”—think Loom for walkthroughs plus Figma embeds, with AI that wrangles every comment into an actionable report.

The pitch is simple: upload a WIP, get peer or expert critique within 24 hours, no Slack-ping scavenger hunt required. Finally, one link to rule the scattered screenshots, threads, and passive-aggressive Loom replies.