Best of Design Patterns — September 2025

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   Article

   Lobsters·37w

   If I hear "design pattern" one more time, I'll go mad

   A critical examination of design patterns in software development, arguing that many patterns are overcomplicated names for simple programming concepts. The author contends that patterns like Command (which is just a function) and Strategy (which is just an interface) create unnecessary cognitive overhead and that developers naturally arrive at these solutions through iterative design without needing formal pattern terminology. The piece advocates for focusing on underlying principles rather than memorizing pattern names, suggesting that good architecture emerges from composing language features to solve problems rather than following prescribed patterns.

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   Article

   Hacker News·37w

   How did MVC get so F’ed up?

   The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern has been misunderstood and misimplemented over the years. The original Smalltalk MVC design keeps models completely unaware of views and controllers, using observer patterns for communication. Modern implementations, particularly Apple's Cocoa version, have corrupted this by making controllers act as intermediaries and creating tightly coupled view-controllers. True MVC requires observable models that can notify multiple views of changes, with the key insight being that models should never depend on their UI components. The pattern works as a composite where views can have their own models, and even function arguments should be treated as observable models to properly enable/disable UI elements.

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   Article

   Zubair Ahmed Rafi·37w

   How to keep your users focus on the screen

   Explores how natural human visual patterns influence digital interface design. Discusses the thumb-width focal range used by major platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook to maintain user focus, and explains F-shaped reading behavior in search interfaces where users read the first line fully, skim the second, then lose attention downward. Emphasizes that effective design guides attention rather than filling space.

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   Article

   Daily Dose of Data Science | Avi Chawla | Substack·34w

   ​6 Popular Agentic Design Patterns Used in AI Products!​

   Explores six key agentic design patterns that power modern AI systems: ReAct (reasoning and action), CodeAct (direct code execution), Modern tool use (external API integration), Self-reflection (error correction), Multi-agent workflows (specialized agent collaboration), and Agentic RAG (intelligent data retrieval). Each pattern addresses specific challenges in AI agent development, with real-world examples from companies like CrewAI, Cursor, and Perplexity demonstrating their practical applications.

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