Karl

Generation “Cracked Photoshop & MySpace”. Design Engineer @duckduckgo. Maker. Skateboarder. Musician. Creator and owner of @dxe_xyz.

[Karl @_kejk]

A manifesto on Design Engineering.

Bring designers and engineers together earlier, prototype to learn, build systems and tooling that scale, and treat code as a design material.

Fewer handoffs and better products. Let’s build the future that actually ships.

[Karl @_kejk]

I owe @LC_Finch at least a beer for convincing me to write this.

[Karl @_kejk]

Wrote a little something about how we approach things writing-first at DuckDuckGo.

We write the design decision before anyone opens Figma. In most orgs a mockup looks resolved even when the thinking isn’t. We decide in words, where being wrong costs an afternoon, not weeks.

[Karl @_kejk]

https://t.co/zZQvdjfC1O

[Karl @_kejk]

@mds Thanks!

[DuckDuckGo @DuckDuckGo]

People don't want AI forced on them. DuckDuckGo lets you choose.

The result? Since Google's AI overhaul, our U.S. installs peaked yesterday at 76% above the pre-announcement average, and we broke our single-day search record. 🔥

It's not a blip, it's a movement. Fire Google.

[Karl @_kejk]

🙃

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:

1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.

2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.

3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.

4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.

5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.

6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.

7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.

8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.

9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).

10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.

[Karl @_kejk]

Actually stoked for this year

[Apple @Apple]

All systems glow. Join us for WWDC26 on 8 June at 6 pm.

[Karl @_kejk]

@doctorbaytas I don’t? Dammit. Career rethink incoming.

[؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜؜lochie @lochieaxon]

when animating variable font weights remember to include tighter optical sizing to maintain the width of the text

[Emil Kowalski @emilkowalski]

To get good animations from an AI you need to get good at telling it what you want:

- "stagger this list of items"
- "make this animation direction-aware"
- "spacial consistency", "crossfade", "layout animation",

I made a motion vocabulary for this:
https://t.co/ExAxpr31no

[PC Gamer @pcgamer]

Traffic to DuckDuckGo's proudly 'No AI' search page has tripled since latest Google AI search update https://t.co/RtvQ4UNEQ8

[Karl @_kejk]

@dotmariusz @jayneil @cursor_ai No, you can stay, that was good

[Karl @_kejk]

@dotmariusz @jayneil @cursor_ai Too kind

[Futurism @futurism]

"People aren’t just complaining about Google's AI search overhaul, they’re leaving." https://t.co/dmr68vPHzF

[Karl @_kejk]

lol

[Annie? Rauwerda? @anniierau]

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

[Karl @_kejk]

@brian_lovin SAME

[Karl @_kejk]

@alexanderrX_ This is true. We are like this.

[DuckDuckGo @DuckDuckGo]

Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our "No AI" search page have tripled…and they’re still rising!

Want to make it your default on Chrome or Firefox? Grab our No-AI extensions and banish AI-assisted answers, chat, and AI images.

[Jayneil Dalal @jayneil]

This is how a top design engineer uses Cursor to ship features 2 weeks faster

He designs directly in code. Doesn't waste hours creating static mocks for all the edge cases.

👀 Full conversation on Sneak Peek:
https://t.co/qcAdcojPFt

@_kejk shows how he uses @cursor_ai to ship AI features super fast for @DuckDuckGo 👇

[Karl @_kejk]

@jamesm Absolute. Fucking. Worst.