Studio notes
Field notes from shipping apps and staffing the front line.Our stories - drafted with AI, written by us.
AI scribes now sit in on consults at over 60% of US Epic hospitals, with consent obtained via a murmured 'yes' after the patient has sat down. The technology is good. The consent protocol and its execution vary by clinic and by clinician. A patient's-perspective argument for what real consent would look like, why the cookie banner regime tells us we already know how, and where the next category-defining vendor will land.
On June 1, GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing. On June 15, Anthropic caps Claude Code. The flat-fee era is ending in a two-week window. Heavy users have been consuming roughly $8 of compute per $1 of subscription revenue; the labs aren't covering that anymore. The off-ramp – self-hosting open-source models – exists, but charges a skill toll that excludes the user base the labs onboarded. Who gets left where, and was the door ever meant to stay open?
Figma is the design tool most designers use. Canva caters to everyone else. Claude Design is Anthropic's new entry trying to do it all. Anthropic could offer the granular editing that would make Claude Design competitive with Canva – they don't, and I think they probably won't. The missing drag handle isn't an oversight. It's strategic discipline, and a bet that AI must be the entire product.
Six concrete things that cost us a weekend on our Expo SDK 55 app: Modal UIWindow isolation, the pointerEvents prop trap, PanResponder swallowing child taps, and when to reach for a Portal-based custom sheet instead of @gorhom/bottom-sheet.
Six months of stable Liquid Glass on expo-glass-effect, broken by the SDK 55 upgrade. Three weeks of remediation, two parallel glass paths, a pile of workarounds – three retired by the latest Expo patches, two still biting in production, and a wider question about what a cross-platform Glass primitive could look like.