Good design is the art of packing 1,000 'hows' into a single 'what'. Good design is compression: making the numerator trend towards infinity…

Francois Chollet, AI researcher and creator of Keras, argues that good design is fundamentally an act of compression — distilling an enormous number of implementation decisions, constraints, and considerations into a single coherent concept or solution. The quality of design can be measured by how much complexity it successfully abstracts away, with the best designs achieving near-infinite compression of underlying "how" questions into a clean, unified "what." This perspective frames design excellence as the ability to hide vast implementation depth behind elegant simplicity.

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Source: Francois Chollet (X) | 2026-04-11