Case Study Club

Ask what to remove

This morning Tibo Sottiaux, who leads the Core Products & Platform team at OpenAI, posted a question: what is a feature we should remove from Codex that isn't useful anymore?

I have been using Codex to build since the Astra release, a few weeks now, and the Work/Codex logic in the app has been frustrating me. I have started in the Work tab a few times, only to realize I need the dropdown to access Codex. And I have to do this every. single. time. I open the app and want to do Codex stuff.

I replied thinking very little of it:

The Chat, Work and Codex flow is confusing. I do not know what separates Work from Codex, or Chat from Work. I asked for either a standalone power-user Codex like before, or Chat and Codex in one app.

It turned out more than me are having that issue, because the reply blew up.

Most product leads ask what to add. Asking what to remove, in public is... very interesting. A sign that AI-built products are getting stuffed with features nobody asked for?

So I asked Grok to read all the replies and cluster them. The top three:

1. Usage limits. The 5-hour rolling cap for Plus users. Roughly 2,500 to 3,500 replies, by far the biggest bucket.

2. Show Pet. Around 700 to 1,100 replies asking for the pet button out of the menu. "Show pet is a toy that shouldn't be in this menu."

3. The Chat/Work/Codex split. Around 250 to 400 replies. "Stop separating chat and work / I still don't know the difference."

Normally a post like this would not be the way to collect feedback. With this much signal it works. The full Grok chat is here.

Tibo asked. I am curious what he removes.

Figma now stores customer data inside Japan for accounts that need it there. figma.com

Intercom's 2026 AI Sentiment Report puts end-user positivity toward AI agents at 49 percent, and 74 percent after watching one resolve a real query. intercom.com

Nielsen Norman Group now discloses that AI copyedits and formats its articles, with a person signing each one. Nielsen Norman Group

Manchester City Women is the first WSL club with an identity separate from the men's team, by Nomad. It's Nice That

Pentagram gave De Bijloke, a 770-year-old concert venue in Ghent, a logo drawn from oscilloscope waveforms. Fonts In Use

The White Album, 1968

Richard Hamilton designed the sleeve for The Beatles in 1968. The band's name is embossed on white paper with no ink. Most sources say the type is Helvetica.

On Fonts In Use, André Gooren compares the original embossing and identifies it as Akzidenz-Grotesk Medium. The S has angled terminals. Helvetica's are flat. He found no published source that names Akzidenz.

The CD and cassette versions use Helvetica 75 Bold. Those reproductions are where the Helvetica attribution comes from.

Read it on Fonts In Use.

DialKit

DialKit by Josh Puckett puts live controls next to the interface you are building. Turn a dial and the motion, layout, colour or animation timing changes on screen without a reload. It works with React, Solid, Svelte, Vue and plain JavaScript. Install it from npm, mount one DialRoot, bind values with a hook. The code is open source on GitHub. The demo on the site shows what it does in under a minute.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

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