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UPDATED 03/21/2026WxH
March 22, 2026 · 5 min read
When was the last time software made you feel something?
I've been playing a lot of Marathon lately, Bungie's new extraction shooter. The visual language is all neon, saturated color and glitchy cybernetic effects. Every pixel feels deliberately loud, like someone made aesthetic choices not because they had to but because they wanted to. It's aggressively bright and animated in a way that most software is too afraid to be. And somewhere between runs, I caught myself thinking: what if my entire computer felt like this?
Not the gameplay. Just the vibe. What if Slack arrived with the same low-gravity bounce? What if my calendar glitched into view like a waypoint on a distant horizon?
That thought is what I want to chase here, because I think it points at something real about where interfaces are going.
There's a trajectory to how we've thought about design. First it was function—does it work? Then craft—does it work beautifully? Pixel-perfect icons, 120Hz scrolling, the cult of fit-and-finish. We're entering something like a third phase now, and the best way I can describe it is: does it feel like mine?
We've actually known this instinct for a long time. MySpace themes. Tumblr CSS. Custom iOS icons. Each of those things was technically worse than the default, and people chose them anyway—enthusiastically—because the emotional return outweighed the functional cost. iOS 18's tint engine is just the latest iteration of the same impulse, slowly loosening the grip of the one-size-fits-all interface. The desire was always there. What's changing is that the cost of satisfying it is collapsing.
Generative AI is why. The interface you used to need a six-week sprint and a Figma file to produce, you can now describe in a sentence. "Make this feel like a rainy Tuesday in Neo-Tokyo." Three seconds later, you have translucent indigo widgets with tram-line accents—and the model can spit out the React, too. The hard part, making something work, is becoming a solved problem. The new hard part is knowing how you want it to feel, and being able to articulate that to a machine.
That's a genuinely interesting inversion. For most of software's history, the bottleneck was technical. Now the bottleneck is almost aesthetic—or maybe more precisely, it's self-knowledge. Do you know what you want your tools to feel like? Most people have never had to answer that question.
Games figured this out decades ago. Skins, battle passes, seasonal refreshes, cosmetic layers that don't change the mechanics at all—players spend billions on pixels that don't boost their stats. Because the transaction was never really about the pixels. It was about mood. Identity. The private mirror you happen to wear in public. Fortnite isn't selling you a look; it's selling you a mood board.
That mental model is about to touch the most boring software on Earth. Expense reports dressed like Blade Runner. A glucose tracker that flickers like a vintage Game Boy. The utility is identical; the emotional payload is brand new. And if the history of gaming cosmetics is any indication, people will pay for that—not reluctantly, but enthusiastically.
The technical shape of this probably looks like two layers: a stable, audited core handling data and logic underneath, and an AI-generated shell on top—fonts, spacing, animation, color grading, even haptic feedback—that you can prompt into existence and toggle off whenever you need to screen-share or onboard someone. The core doesn't care what the shell looks like. The shell doesn't touch the core. When you strip it away, you're back to sterile defaults. When you turn it on, your laptop becomes yours in a way hardware never could.
What gets interesting is what this does to brand. If every user remixes their own interface, a brand stops being a visual monolith and starts being something more like an aesthetic engine. Spotify ships the lo-fi study beats skin. Nike ships volt-green velocity. The logo still lives in the corner—but the chrome around it is crowd-sourced feeling. Identity becomes a living shader rather than a static style guide.
It also means smaller teams can do more. A five-person studio can build a beautifully specific product for a beautifully specific audience without needing a design system the size of a small country. The large players won't disappear—they'll run the secure substrate—but a thousand indie studios will paint on top of it. Culture already moved from three TV networks to thirty million TikTok channels. Software is just catching up.
I keep coming back to that Marathon HUD and the involuntary thing it does to me when I open the game. Nothing about it makes me a better player. It just makes me want to be there. That's the feeling—that small, unreasonable delight—that the next decade of software is quietly optimizing for.
Imagine opening your laptop tomorrow morning and being asked: how should today feel? You type something. The OS shifts. Notifications arrive differently. Your spreadsheet cells glow a color you chose. Nothing is faster. Everything is better. You smile without meaning to, while expensing a sandwich.
That smile is the metric. Function was always table stakes. The frontier is whether your tools feel like they belong to you.