Also designers that know a bit of code understand which sort of designs are easy or hard to build and are better at handing specs to other developers.

As a "designer who codes" or a "coder who designs" (funny how we never mention developers who are familiar with the design process, but that's another story) I agree to that only to a very little extent, mostly when engineering UI elements for the web.

But let's say that you are designing for an Android or iOS app: the 'bit' of HTML/CSS/JS code you know won't be very helpful to understand whether a component can be developed in Java or Swift.

And what about UX design? Take a standard React app. You need a very deep understanding of React (and Javascript) to be able to judge whether a user flow you just designed is easy to implement or not.

TL;DR just wanted to say that the benefit of coding as a designer are VERY VERY dependent on the context you work.

Regardless the visual appearance - on which, imho, the discussion focuses much more on branding than anything else - this lock screen redesign was driven by the fact that now you can actually interact with notifications as they were app widgets. The old 'minimalistic' notification design simply wouldn't work for this interaction so, as shocked as we all may be seeing iOs slowly turning into Android, I don't think this is a total design disaster.

Am I the only one who is a bit skeptic about this new "medium-blogpost" marketing technique? I think is ultimately silly, it tricks you into reading a blog article about design - by which you hope to learn something and start a discussion out of it - and it merely ends up being a TV ad. By the way, no, CLI is not the future. GUI replaced it because it conveys more information and thus more affordance for users who are not expert and don't know the system. Plus, CLI requires text inputs which is easier if you have a standard size keyboard in front of you. It could also requires more cognitive effort since you have to abstract an action into a line of text. I agree that command line interfaces are be more effective in some cases (e.g Git), but hey, no way the future is gonna look like matrix green code.