James Burke

Product Designer / Engineer

[James Burke @lifesized]

@JohnnyNel_ Yes. The part I keep noticing is that this isn’t just backend hygiene.

If the system has the wrong model of the world, the interface can only decorate the confusion.

[James Burke @lifesized]

Designers, skipping the data model is becoming harder to defend.

Pretty UI can’t fix confused data.

If the system does not know what something means, the interface will struggle to explain it.

If the product cannot show where a claim came from, trust breaks.

If everything is treated as equally true, uncertainty gets hidden instead of designed.

AI tools make this easier to miss.

You open Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Claude Code or another builder.
Suddenly there is an app.
Then a login flow.
Then a database.

Now you are deciding:

- What should be saved?
- What belongs together?
- What can change?
- What can be inferred?
- What the product is allowed to trust?

You may not call that data modeling.

But that is what it is.

I’m starting a series called Data for Designers because I keep running into this while building Cartewei, a menu intelligence project around NYC restaurants.

At first, it looked like a scraping problem.

Find the menu.
Parse the PDF.
Extract the dishes.
Capture the prices.

But the deeper problem is meaning.

Is this menu current?
Is this dish the same as last month?
Can this price be trusted?
What source did this claim come from?

You’re not just designing screens.
You’re designing what the system understands.
Strong design starts with a strong model of the world.
You don’t need to be a database engineer.
Just care enough to ask what the data means.

[James Burke @lifesized]

The recent @Flora API release unlock is kicking in. Codex + GPT 5.5, + skill to use Flora to generate images on a specific canvas and replicatate or request to duplicate images to @paper = instant slide decks, identity + brand exploration and more. Mind blown!

[James Burke @lifesized]

https://t.co/zDz1hSHh2Q

[James Burke @lifesized]

Hosting a new guided walking tour in NYC this Sunday as part of Municipal Art Society of New York's Jane Jacob's, "Jane’s Walk NYC 2026".

[James Burke @lifesized]

@tomjohndesign @v0 @iamsahaj_xyz When not: ...in the thick of things in a project. Intent: fine-tune a component → roll own custom tool or customize other tool repos.
When: Early project or blue sky wanting to explore a specific UI interaction only vaguely connected to project.

[James Burke @lifesized]

@andyhsuco sign me up, great initiative

[James Burke @lifesized]

https://t.co/tvyDvIQ88M

[James Burke @lifesized]

Here's something I built to help with staying up to date with the relentless release cycle of new content on YouTube.

- Easy to transcribe videos and summarize in your LLM of choice
- Includes skills for Claude Desktop and Open Claw

[James Burke @lifesized]

@floraai If you want to level up fast, go to hackathons. Best way to meet people and pressure-test new techniques.

[James Burke @lifesized]

My teammate at last week's hackathon wasn't human.
At the Self-Improving Agent Hack at Datadog (packed event in the same Midtown building as the NYT), I sat down next to Stephen. He introduced his engineer: an OpenClaw bot named Sven.

[James Burke @lifesized]

My favorite part: the landing page. I built a pipeline generating AI character portraits → video of authors with books, all on white backgrounds using @floraai

[James Burke @lifesized]

@joshpuckett Nice one @joshpuckett. I will give it a whirl. Did you also see Tweakpane? Pretty cool project that is similar to yours. https://t.co/OC6W8oCI6D

[James Burke @lifesized]

@kevinrose @kilocode Do i see your crab legs?