Brian Schwartz

Experience Design leader, former developer & entrepreneur. Also, noun, 2nd noun, 3rd noun and adjective. Opinions are my own.

[Peter Dedene @dedene]

POV: you're still using GitHub Copilot after June 1st, 2026

[zeldman @zeldman]

What a workshop taught us about closing the gap between design and code.

“The bigger shift isn’t the tooling. It’s where design work happens now. Design iteration used to live almost entirely in @Figma and then get translated into code.

“With #AI in the loop, a lot of that iteration is moving into the codebase itself: tweaking spacing, trying a different empty state, rewording microcopy, rethinking a small interaction—all using production components, real data, and actual platform constraints.

“Figma is still where most of the bigger UX thinking starts. But the local dev environment is becoming a design tool in its own right: one where your prototype is already built from the real thing.”

https://t.co/eo4r3tBhhi @automatticdsgn

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

@EASPORTSF1 Insanely low. 5 GPs this year, Kimi has won the last 4 and finished 2nd in the other. I know silver arrows are fast, but c'mon.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

The Mariah Carey Christmas discourse is not hype. It's a measurable phenomenon. 227 plays in 37 days on one station.

Built a scraper in 2019 to track the lack of variety in Christmas Music. Just updated the visualizations. https://t.co/0fis9a3Sa8

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

AI research tools will find patterns in your interviews. They won't tell you if those patterns are true.

Wrote about the shift in qualitative UX research, which tools are worth knowing, and the validation step people often skip.

https://t.co/1tYOOjLSfw

#UXResearch #AI

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[zeldman @zeldman]

“I spent about five minutes connecting Claude directly to my WordPress site this morning. No plugin. No middleware. No Zapier. Just two things WordPress and Claude already had sitting there, waiting.

“If you’ve been wondering whether you can get Claude to read, draft, edit, or post to your site without engineering anything, the answer is yes—and the path is shorter than you’d think.”

https://t.co/9Ju4laj0vh

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

Figma tables are a lie.
They can't sort. Can't filter. Can't tell you what happens with 500 rows.
Here's how to build the real thing with Claude or Cursor in under 5 minutes.
https://t.co/u4xLpg2890

[Prasenjit @Star_Knight12]

GitHub just got hacked, a single VS Code extension did it.

→ Nx Console (2.2M installs) got hijacked, credential stealer hidden in an orphan commit
→ it harvested tokens from GitHub, npm, AWS, Kubernetes, even 1Password
→ a GitHub employee installed it
→ attackers accessed ~3,800 of GitHub's internal repositories
→ threat actor "TeamPCP" is now selling the stolen data on the dark web
→ the poisoned version was live for only 11 minutes before detection
→ GitHub confirmed it and spent the night rotating all critical secrets

one extension, 11 minutes. 3,800 internal repos compromised.

check your extensions right now.

[Klaas @forgebitz]

software engineering in 2026:

- your package manager is compromised
- your cloud provider blocks your account
- github itself is hacked

software is solved

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

Show fake data to a detail-obsessed stakeholder and watch your feedback session go sideways. Here's one repeatable process I use to keep mockups credible: Content Reel + Faker.
https://t.co/Qgg3CQCdbr

#uxdesign #figma

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

@TLCards17 A possibility I hadn’t considered. I want a refund on some faulty parts if I am.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

Using AI to scan the things I wrote that sound AI-generated, so the paper I wrote doesn't get flagged by a different AI.
"passive construction is a consistent AI flag", yeah, I know, but I wrote that...
Framing phrases like these are commonly flagged (yes, but I wrote it).

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

@danielcberk @Spotify And a sleep mode to ignore those songs too. I don't want to find out how I'm the top listener to Brown Noise or Thunderstorm Sounds in a wrapped. Or get recommended spa music.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

My dad was an attorney with a BA in English. I write like an AI, and now everything I submit will be considered AI-generated forever. I hate it. Em dashes, colons, oxford commas, and semicolons need a resurgence. Who's with me?

[Montreal Expos @Montreal_Expos]

The Montreal Expos are exiting the baseball space. During Q2 and Q3 2026, we will transition to acquiring high-performance GPU assets. This is all part of our long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

Finally, the new one! Fulfilling the prophecy of my kids receiving a lifetime of "May the Schwartz be with you."

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First teaser for ‘SPACEBALLS: THE NEW ONE’.

In theaters on April 23, 2027.

[M.A. Rothman @MichaelARothman]

𝐍𝐎, 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐈. 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.

I see it constantly now. Someone reads a post or an article and spots an em dash — that long horizontal line — and immediately declares it was written by AI. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡, 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐆𝐏𝐓. You know who else uses em dashes? People who actually learned how English punctuation works.

I don't normally step on this particular soapbox — and I commit authorial malpractice by never trying to sell you my books — but I've authored over 30 of them. Many have been international bestsellers. Well over 𝟏,𝟎𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐬 in print, translated into 7+ languages, sold around the world. I am, amongst many other things, an actual author. So let me give you a quick education your grammar teachers apparently skipped.

The em dash — this thing right here — is one of the most versatile punctuation marks in the English language. It's called an "em dash" because in traditional typesetting, it was the width of the capital letter M in whatever typeface you were using. It serves three primary functions. First, it sets off a parenthetical statement within a sentence — like this one — when you want more emphasis than commas provide but less formality than parentheses. Second, it signals an abrupt break in thought or a dramatic pivot. Third, it introduces an explanation or amplification of what came before it. Writers have been using it for centuries. Emily Dickinson used em dashes so obsessively her manuscripts look like they were attacked by a horizontal line. Mark Twain used them constantly in dialogue. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them had access to ChatGPT.

Now for a bit of trivia most people never learn. There's also an 𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 — slightly shorter, the width of the letter N. The en dash has a narrower purpose: it connects ranges. Pages 12–44. The years 1941–1945. The New York–London flight. It's the dash between two things that are connected but distinct. Most people have never heard of it, and most fonts render it just barely shorter than an em dash, which is why almost nobody notices the difference.

Both have been part of formal typography since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. Gutenberg's typesetters used varying dash lengths to organize text. By the 18th century, printers had standardized the em and en dash as distinct glyphs with distinct grammatical functions. This isn't some modern AI invention — it's older than the United States.

And if you use Microsoft Word, they're trivially easy to type. An en dash is Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad. An em dash is Ctrl + Alt + Minus on the numeric keypad. Word also auto-converts two hyphens (--) into an em dash if you have autocorrect enabled. That's why you see me use them in my books and in my posts — because I know they exist and I know the keyboard shortcut.

The reason AI chatbots use em dashes frequently is because they were trained on well-written text — books, journalism, academic papers — written by people who knew the rules. The AI learned proper punctuation from proper writers. That doesn't make proper punctuation a sign of AI. It makes it a sign of 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲.

For the record, the only things I use AI for are conjuring up a quick graphic — like the image on this post — or as a shortcut for preliminary research. Think of it as a Google accelerator. The writing? That's all me. It has been for 30+ books and countless social media posts such as this one.

If you've reached the end of this post, you now know more about dashes than most people who graduated with an English degree. And the next time you see an em dash and your first instinct is to scream "AI" — maybe consider that what you're actually looking at is someone who paid attention in class. Or someone whose grammar teachers didn't fail them quite as badly as yours failed you.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

@peter_lingua_ This is the music video to the song spoonman by soundgarden from ‘94.

[Brian Schwartz @creativereason]

If Nicolas Roy can command a 1st, how are the Blues not making more moves? #stlblues