Tom and Jonny are back for another wide-ranging episode.

Jonny starts by recapping his golf trip to Mallorca — where a non-technical friend used Lovable to vibe-code a fully functional scoring app for their annual 16-man Ryder Cup-style tournament, the Stryder Cup. It's a perfect case study in personal software.

From there, Tom brings a meaty topic: the "death of the middle manager" narrative gaining steam in the press. Drawing on his five years as Director of Product Design at Monzo, Tom and Jonny debate whether this is a real structural shift or a post-ZIRP overcorrection — and what managers should actually do to stay relevant.

In the quick-fire round, Jonny introduces Ideogram, a small but opinionated image model that excels at visual design and can be self-hosted and fine-tuned on your own work. Tom follows up with Midjourney's unexpected pivot into health and wellness medical devices — and what it says about where AI companies might be headed.

They close by testing themselves on "In the Weights" — a site that checks if your name appears in AI training data. Jonny is in (top 25% British product designer). Tom is not.

Finally, they tease an upcoming half-day AI design workshop open to individuals — coming late July/early August. Email podcast@nearfuture.works with feedback, ideas, or complaints.

Chapters
0:00 — Welcome & podcast updates
New email address: podcast@nearfuture.works

1:23 — Guests & format chat
Guests are coming — but this pod isn't going guest-only

2:00 — Jonny's golf trip to Mallorca
16-man Ryder Cup-style tournament, Mallorca, 35-degree heat

4:06 — The Strider Cup app — vibe coded on Lovable
How a non-technical friend built a live scoring app with AI — and why personal software is the perfect use case

8:59 — Can AI improve your golf game?
Spoiler: Jonny is a lost cause

10:49 — Are middle managers finished?
Tom introduces the "Middle Managers in the Firing Line" article and his Monzo perspective

18:36 — Tom's take: the functions matter, not the title
Is Jack Dorsey right? Tom's nuanced answer on direction, psychological safety, and player-coaches

22:02 — Jonny's take: I don't buy it
Manager-to-report ratios, the pastoral role, swanning around looking busy, and the market doesn't care what you enjoy

32:56 — Quick fire: Ideogram
A small, opinionated image model built for visual design — and why it points toward personal, self-hostable AI tools

38:27 — Quick fire: Midjourney's wild pivot
From sci-fi image generation to… health and wellness medical devices

43:50 — In the Weights — are you in the training data?
Tom and Jonny test themselves live. Results are humbling for one of them.

47:55 — Upcoming AI design workshop
Half-day, ticketed, late July/early August — build your own AI design tools

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## Links:
- https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/middle-managers-in-the-firing-line-8966722/
- https://ideogram.ai
- https://www.midjourney.com/medical
- https://intheweights.com

Find us at nearfuture.works or email the pod at podcast@nearfuture.works with suggestions and ideas for content or guests.

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Jonny and Tom dig into the uncomfortable reality of Europe's dependence on US-controlled AI — sparked by Anthropic's Fable 5 being banned outside America days after launch. They explore what the dystopian narrative Europe 2031 predicts for the continent, debate London's surprising rise as an AI talent hub, wrestle with what it means to build a business in the age of AI, and Tom reveals his open-source design tooling project, Kazam.

0:00 — Introduction & the content pipeline
Jonny and Tom kick off the episode and share their very low-tech approach to collecting topics throughout the week — a Slack thread — which immediately surfaced the biggest AI story of the moment.

1:27 — Fable 5, banned in minutes: the sovereignty wake-up call
Anthropic's most powerful model yet was blocked for all non-US citizens within four days of launch. What does it mean when critical infrastructure can be switched off by a foreign government overnight?

4:42 — Europe 2031: a cautionary tale
Jonny breaks down the 18,000-word narrative podcast europe2031.ai — a near-future story of Europe's failure to build sovereign AI capability, its dependence on open models that eventually disappear, and the grim choice between American and Chinese technology.

9:53 — What does this actually mean for you?
Tom pushes for practical takeaways. If AI vanished tomorrow it'd probably be fine — but the longer dependency grows, the harder it becomes to function without it. From job market effects to information control, the risks are subtle but compounding.

13:21 — Practical steps: diversify your AI diet
Rather than avoiding AI, Jonny argues for being intentional about where you get it from. Use open-weight models, try Mistral, explore OpenRouter — don't build critical dependency on US big tech whose incentives may not align with yours.

15:36 — The acceleration problem and European incentives
Tom reflects on how the structural incentives driving US and Chinese AI development will naturally widen the gap with Europe — even without any bad intentions from the US side.

17:18 — London rising: DeepMind, Cursor, and the talent story
Cursor just announced a 200-person London office. Tom traces how Demis Hassabis's insistence on keeping a London team when Google acquired DeepMind seeded a generation of AI talent — now paying dividends for the whole city.

19:14 — Nuance: AI isn't just bad or just good
Jonny argues for holding the tension — concentration of power is genuinely worrying, but the potential benefits to humanity (drug discovery, scientific breakthroughs) are also real. The podcast's purpose is navigation, not evangelism.

22:51 — Building a business in the AI era
The guys get into the meta-question: what is the right business model for an AI consultancy? Training vs. capability delivery, day rates vs. outcome-based pricing, what to give away free vs. what to keep — and why neither of them really has the answer yet.

35:24 — Tom's open-source project: Kazam
Tom reveals what he's been building — a lightweight open-source design framework for creating portable, lo-fi design micro-tools as single HTML files. No npm, no server, no dependencies. Inspired by a workshop where 60 designers built 60 tools in 3 hours.

Links
europe2031.ai
Jacob Heftmann
grillitype.com
Our 1 page HTML tool example: https://dither-shape-p.ooda.run/

Find us at nearfuture.works

Tom and Jonny reflect on their live workshop at Product Unleashed in London, explore the history of designers building their own tools, and dig into how AI can be used as a counterbalance to your own working style — not just an amplifier.

Chapters

Building a Design Tool in 15 Minutes at Product Unleashed
Tom and Jonny recap the workshop they ran at Product Unleashed, where they built retro design tools (Etch A Sketch, MS Paint) live in front of an audience — twice. They discuss how the challenge evolved, why they pivoted from serious tools to fun ones, and how they got the final result live on the internet using a QR code.

Why Designers Building Their Own Tools Matters
Jonny shares the narrative from the workshop's opening slides — a Gutenberg-moment argument for why designers are now able to build hyper-personalized tools for the first time, referencing Adobe, Figma, and the growing landscape of AI-native design tools.

Historical Examples: Eames, Lennon & the Apple Calculator
Tom walks through three historical examples of makers building tools to unlock their own creativity: Chris Espinoza's Calculator Construction Set for Steve Jobs, Ken Townsend inventing automatic double tracking for John Lennon, and Charles and Ray Eames creating the Kazam machine to bend plywood into new furniture forms.

The Value of Craft in the Age of AI
Jonny reflects on Karri Saaranen (founder of Linear) and his view that design is the thinking — and there's no shortcut to it. The conversation explores whether something made quickly can ever be truly iconic, and why craft still has real, felt value even as AI capabilities grow.

AI as Amplifier or Counterbalance: Knowing Your Working Style
Tom introduces the idea that AI shouldn't just universally amplify — for some people (perfectionists who stall), it should act as a counterbalance, nudging them to ship. For others (fast movers who skip deliberation), the opposite. Both share personal examples of how they've tuned their own AI workflows around their personality types.

Ooda: Instantly Sharing Internal Prototypes
Jonny shares an update on Ooda, his tool that lets teams publish prototypes, tools, and documents to a private, secure link in seconds — just by asking Claude. He explains the pivot from "run your dev server in the cloud" to "don't let your team's work disappear," and why the response from a handful of people last week convinced him the problem is real.

Building a Calculator with a 5-Year-Old
Tom shares a heartwarming weekend story of building a calculator with his five-year-old son Waltie — complete with a car button, a horse button, and a Lego-themed interface — and reflects on what it means to grow up in an era where building software is as natural as playing. Jonny draws parallels to how touchscreens changed children's expectations of interaction.

• (00:00) - Episode #3:
• (00:04) - Building a Design Tool in 15 Minutes at Product Unleashed
• (07:45) - Why Designers Building Their Own Tools Matters
• (12:13) - Historical Examples: Eames, Lennon & the Apple Calculator
• (19:57) - The Value of Craft in the Age of AI
• (22:45) - AI as Amplifier or Counterbalance: Knowing Your Working Style
• (34:32) - Ooda: Instantly Sharing Internal Prototypes
• (43:59) - Building a Calculator with a 5-Year-Old

Find us at nearfuture.works

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Tom and Jonny dig into the outcomes of Tom's Mostly Working event featuring James Storer from Monzo, unpacking how leading design teams are using AI not to ship faster, but to learn faster — and why the language of "design vs. product" is getting in the way. They get into the state of Figma: is it losing its grip on the design workflow, or is it actually thriving? And they draw an unexpected parallel to the smartphone camera era to ask whether AI will democratise design the same way. Plus: upcoming events, what they're each building, and some honest holiday parenting failure.

• 0:04 — Mostly Working: AI in Design at Monzo — Tom recaps the event with James Storer, prototyping at Monzo, and why the team focuses on learning speed over shipping speed
• 6:11 — Three Use Cases for AI in Design Workflows — Jonny breaks down the emerging buckets: shipping production code, faster prototyping, and building internal tools
• 13:12 — Is Figma Losing Its Grip? — Jonny's spicy take on Figma overreaching, seat cancellation stats from a 90-person design org, and the Adobe comparison
• 18:17 — Figma's Growth vs. The Designer Exodus — Two things can be true: enterprise growth numbers and a slow professional exodus
• 21:29 — The Smartphone Camera Analogy — Did smartphones kill professional photography? And will AI do the same to design?
• 25:52 — Upcoming Events: Berlin, Shoreditch & Brighton — Jonny's "Tools That Shape Us" talk at Hatch Berlin (Sep 18), the live build session at Product Unleashed Shoreditch, and the Brighton workshop
• 35:37 — What We're Building — Jonny's prototype hosting tool, a Notion CRM, and Tom's AI-powered family holiday journal idea

Find us at nearfuture.works

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Near Future Podcast – Pilot Episode

Welcome to the Near Future Podcast, where Tom and Jonny explore what they're building, learning, and experimenting with as AI reshapes how we work.

In this episode:

Agentic Murder Mystery
Jonny walks through his experiment building a six-agent murder mystery game using NanoClaw. He created a cast of AI suspects — each with their own secrets, personalities, and email inboxes — and ran a live session with a group of exited startup founders. The conversation covers what makes agents distinct from standard LLMs (triggers, tools, memory, collaboration), and the surprisingly playful emergent behaviour that unfolded when participants tried to interrogate and social-engineer the AI suspects.

The Near Future Logo Instrument
Tom shares his experiment turning the Near Future logo into an interactive, playable design tool — built in Claude Code — that generates ambient generative music as the logo animates. The conversation explores what it means to treat a brand asset as a toy, and how ephemeral software experiments fuel deeper craft practice.

Craft, Design, and What Lasts
Jonny reflects on receiving his long-awaited Poem Clock — a piece of hardware by Matt Webb that displays AI-generated rhyming couplets telling the time — as a lens for thinking about what makes design feel timeless. The duo discuss Dieter Rams' principles, the difference between craft as polish vs. craft as practice, and what that means for designers navigating the AI era.

Hiring Designers in the Age of AI
Tom shares observations from a recent head of design hiring process — how AI is adding noise on both sides, what strong portfolios look like right now, and the balance between deep foundations and pushing the frontier.

Design Engineering & the Future of the Design Team
A candid discussion on whether every designer needs to become a design engineer, the role of different archetypes within a team, and how to close the gap between Figma and code without putting everyone in an IDE.

Tools We're Excited About

• Tom: Flora AI (visual asset generation with reference images), Notion's new agent capabilities
• Jonny: UK-built sovereign design tools — Dawn Labs, Superhands, and Dessn

• (00:00) - Pilot episode
• (00:04) - Introduction
• (01:07) - Agentic Murder Mystery
• (15:17) - The Near Future Logo Instrument
• (22:27) - Craft, Design & What Lasts
• (29:03) - Hiring Designers in the Age of AI
• (33:30) - Design Engineering & the Future of Design Teams
• (45:56) - Tools We're Excited About

Find us at nearfuture.works