Akhil Dakinedi's Avatar

Akhil Dakinedi

@akhil17

Product Designer & aspiring human. Writes long Medium posts about design & video game UI. Talks about coffee, Pokémon, & existential dread. https://www.akhildakinedi.com/

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11.12.2024
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Latest posts by Akhil Dakinedi @akhil17

It's so crazy how we've gone back to the CLI era of interacting with our machines, now just with AI agents. They're straight up superior when you can't figure out where in a clunky dashboard a company has buried the thing you need and is often easier to ask an AI agent to find it + take action on it

05.03.2026 06:08 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Cairn but it’s 4-player couch co-op where each player controls a different limb of the climber, all in real-time

27.02.2026 02:28 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

25.01.2026 12:28 👍 47530 🔁 14314 💬 521 📌 600

My IG explore page has entirely devolved into Mega Starmie meme content and I want to keep it that way

07.01.2026 03:53 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Is it just me or is the whole keyboard dismiss method completely broken since iOS 26? Like half the apps I use have some broken input interaction where you can't dismiss the keyboard and proceed with the primary action on-screen

02.01.2026 04:23 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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lmao this was my heads down work mode soundtrack

04.12.2025 01:31 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Presenting the revolutionary new Gemini 3 Pro experience in Antigravity

24.11.2025 03:10 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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As a user, I want to be sternly threatened with a warning

30.10.2025 19:26 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Anything you mark with your spyglass gets a generic tag like "Mysterious Pagoda" until you actually go there and figure out what the name of the place is, at which point it updates. Such a great way to encourage active discovery & exploration. Truly hats off to Isaburo the Cartographer, the real MVP

15.10.2025 07:58 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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The traveler's maps are also such a fun minigame where you have to place the landmark from geographical clues. It requires just enough effort to try and figure out where something fits is so that you actually remember that there's something around that area even if you're not actively looking for it

15.10.2025 07:58 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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I'm so impressed with #GhostOfYotei and its dedication to not having a quest tracker, journal or any kind of log at all. They went all-in on the fully immersive map as the place to track everything: quests, bounties, shrines, wolf/fox dens, inns, NPCs, landmarks etc. It works so bloody well 👏

15.10.2025 07:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Decentralizing quality Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

New essay! What the heck is "quality", anyway? And how can we intentionally and meaningfully create it in our work?

matthewstrom.com/writing/dece...

30.09.2025 18:55 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Got the first clear in #Hades2 after 28 runs! With the Sister Blades at that...the weapon I was struggling to use the most. Aspect of Pan made it suit my playstyle a lot more. Onwards to repeatedly doing this a hundred more times ✌️

30.09.2025 18:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

It’s always hilarious to me when companies define a chunk of their audience as “price-sensitive”…like come on that literally encompasses 99% of the world population right now

28.09.2025 00:08 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I often find myself longing for the general vibe of the Alan Wake universe. One moment I’m grinding coffee beans and my mind is going “Man imagine sipping this while driving around Cauldron Lake heading towards Coffee World on a misty morning, that’s the stuff”

20.09.2025 21:35 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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How To Build A Resilient Design Team | Figma Blog How do you build a team that’s resilient to change, no matter what’s around the corner?

New on the @figma.com blog – I wrote about building resilient design teams, especially in times of constant macro change and instability.

Sharing some tips here around team health and culture, craft, scaling with intention…and having fun together while you’re at it:

www.figma.com/blog/how-to-...

11.09.2025 13:20 👍 26 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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The product design talent crisis Why we should invest in the next generation of product designers

100% accurate — I often feel like I can’t give junior designers valuable career advice because of exactly this problem matthewstrom.com/writing/prod...

02.08.2025 18:40 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Amazon seriously needs some kind of tier-system in its search results. Usually the cheapest brands of an item have the most number of reviews and the more expensive/premium brands have very few because not enough people purchased them. Super hard to get a sense of quality for the pricier options

25.07.2025 17:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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[Pt. 2/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Part 2/2 of deep-dive case study on how I prototyped, built, and shipped Poker Slam to the iOS App Store using Cursor.

Part 2: medium.com/@a_kill_/pt-...

27.05.2025 01:40 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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[Pt. 1/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Part 1/2 of deep-dive case study on how I prototyped, built, and shipped Poker Slam to the iOS App Store using Cursor.

Extra long special feature two-part blog post documenting how I built this is now live: medium.com/@a_kill_/pt-...

27.05.2025 01:40 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

There's so many hidden mechanics and interactions I was unaware of. Looking forward to playing it again with dev commentary on to dive deeper into all the design decisions on this one! What a high watermark for VR 👏

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Having played through several other games on PSVR2, I still feel like this is king. The ambition and technical wizardry is just completely unmatched by anything else out there right now. Despite all the praise it has received, it still feels underrated!

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

7. Story: The tie-in to Half Life 2: Episode Two and the G-Man are amazing and totally unexpected for a game like this

8. Jeff: Need I say more? Easily the most memorable level in the entire game

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

4. Physics simulation: Fluid inside bottles, markers on glass, it all behaves exactly how you'd expect and feels so intuitive

5. Character models: Lifelike animation, highly detailed facial models and expressions

6. Environments: Unbelievably detailed and varied environments, esp. the alien ones

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

1. Gravity gloves: absolutely satisfying core gameplay mechanic that never gets old

2. Weapons: Small selection of 3 weapons with upgradeable mods that felt like they were custom-made for VR

3. Interactivity: Everything can be picked up and used as a weapon, a distraction, or a tool

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Finally played through Half Life Alyx in VR after 5 years of the game having been out. This is by far the most immersive and incredible gaming experience I've ever had, there's so many things about it that just blow the competition so far out of the water!

12.05.2025 08:11 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

Thanksss Gui! I also spent several hours attempting to add Metal shader effects to the cards which looked even cooler but it kept crashing lol, going to give it another go in an update soon

02.05.2025 15:07 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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‎Poker Slam ‎Create classic poker hands like pairs, flushes, and straights by connecting adjacent cards on a dynamic 5x5 grid. The rarer the hand, the bigger the score — so plan carefully, think ahead, and maximi...

Shipped a MVP / prototype of my first app (fully built with Cursor), check it out if you’re on iOS: apps.apple.com/us/app/poker...

02.05.2025 07:04 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 3 📌 0

I've learned way more Swift by debugging AI code output than I have through years of trying to hack stuff in XCode manually. There's something way more approachable about focusing on specific errors in code and learning how to fix it than trying to write everything from scratch yourself.

01.04.2025 11:38 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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The Future Favors the Curious » Mike Industries If you’re a designer in the market for a job right now, you probably feel behind the AI wave already, and you’re wondering if the skills you’ve honed in your career are even useful anymore. One of the...

Wrote a little piece about how AI is changing the job market for designers. Something similar happened in 1995, and there is a clear way through it if you stay curious. mikeindustries.com/blog/archive...

31.03.2025 15:35 👍 46 🔁 10 💬 5 📌 4