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What Anthropic's Report and Ferrari's First EV, the "Luce," Reveal About Design

June 8, 2026

What Anthropic's Report and Ferrari's First EV, the "Luce," Reveal About Design

Hi there. This is 服部陽良, founder of coiai Inc., one year into running my own company.

As the founder of an IT company centered on making things — doing system development and product development — I share the reality of running a startup on this show every Monday.

Today's main topics are Anthropic's report "When AI Builds Itself," released on June 4, and Ferrari's first fully electric car, the "Luce." The latter turned out to be pretty interesting, so as someone who personally loves industrial design, I'm just going to speak my mind about it.

Why It's Been Four Weeks, and a Quick Life Update

It's been almost four weeks since the last episode of this podcast. What I was actually doing wasn't so much being busy — honestly, I was just feeling a bit down, my mood had dipped a little.

Work itself has been stabilizing, with new orders coming in and preparation underway for the next big job, so things had settled into a somewhat calmer phase.

The Timing of Quitting My Part-Time Job, and the Okayama Project

Up until now, I'd always been running my company while also working a part-time job on the side. Now that our own company's work has finally grown bigger, the timing has come to quit the part-time job. That's a genuinely welcome development.

Some of you listening to this podcast might be thinking about starting your own company someday. If so, you'll probably go the route of keeping your current job while building a new company on the side. Landing a job big enough to let you step away from what you were originally doing is a real step forward, both from a management perspective and from the perspective of the company-building process — a genuinely happy moment.

And starting in July, as part of one of these bigger projects, it looks like I'll be leaving Tokyo to work in Okayama. The environment is going to change, but I'm looking forward to it.

Main Topic 1: Anthropic's "When AI Builds Itself" Report

Now for the main topic. Anthropic's report "When AI Builds Itself," published on June 4, got picked up widely by tech media around the world — Hacker News and plenty of other places have been covering it.

Laying Out the Numbers

Claude has kept growing to the point where it's now reached the stage of improving itself.

Recursive Self-Improvement

The term Anthropic itself uses is "Recursive Self-Improvement." Put simply, AI has reached the stage where it can design and implement the next AI, one that's better than itself.

That's a kind of singularity, isn't it? The phase where "a computer builds the next computer" has arrived for real, not as science fiction. I recall Ray Kurzweil himself talking about something like this stage a good while back (I don't remember his exact words, so I'll cover that properly another time).

What It Feels Like from the Inside

I actually code with Claude Code every single day myself, and my honest sense is "it's way more than 8x." Getting output that exceeds what I actually asked for has simply become normal at this point. Over the past year, the way I write code has completely changed.

From the perspective of engineering work, if output is 8x, then the same work can be done with one-eighth the headcount. I think we're heading into an era where the very meaning of an engineer's existence is going to shift dramatically.

coiai's Take: We See It Through the Lens of "Making Things"

We at coiai are, above all, a company centered on making things. Our goal is to build good things, and through that, enable a richer life and richer work for people. So even if AI speeds up design and implementation, the essence of the output itself might not change all that much.

That said — speaking as someone running agile development — faster implementation means the completeness of the product we ship at each iteration goes up, which means, in practice, what we hand our clients every two weeks keeps getting genuinely better. That part is undeniably a good thing.

Main Topic 2: My Uneasy Feeling About the Ferrari Luce

Now for something that's been on my mind personally. The exterior of Ferrari's new EV, the "Luce," has finally been unveiled. There had been rumors of Jony Ive's involvement with Ferrari for a while, with glimpses of the dashboard and steering wheel trickling out officially, but this was the moment the whole car body was finally revealed.

My honest first impression was: "this ended up being a car with a somewhat unclear purpose." I think the market's reaction, broadly speaking, leaned the same way.

It doesn't seem to have settled on a clear concept — is it a car chasing speed, or a tool chasing comfort and livability? Looking at the official website, there's a fair amount of messaging around speed, and given that it's coming from Ferrari, you can't really separate it from the thrill of speed. I found myself wondering how well that meshed with the experience LoveFrom actually wanted to deliver.

A Personal Note First: I Love Design and Making Things

The reason I wanted to talk about the Luce is simply that I love design, a huge amount. I love Jony Ive, I love Marc Newson, I love industrial design as a whole — more broadly, I love pretty much anyone who makes things.

Completely unrelated tangent, but I also love things like the knitting and watercolor paintings made by grandmothers on display at local heritage museums. I'm just the type of person who's strongly drawn to the fact that someone made something, period.

Marc Newson and the "Ford 021C" Concept Car

Jony Ive is the person behind things like the translucent-bodied iMac at Apple — probably needs no introduction. As for Marc Newson, he's known for a famous streamlined metal chair (I can't recall the exact name off the top of my head — just search "Marc Newson"), but the piece I actually want to highlight today is something else.

It's the "Ford 021C," a concept car Marc Newson unveiled together with Ford back in 1999. I love it, an enormous amount.

I'm just genuinely fascinated by the phenomenon of a designer getting involved with cars in general. Not from an engineering perspective, but what happens when someone rooted in user-centered design steps into the automotive world. I'd always wanted to see that play out.

The car market is fundamentally a pretty masculine space, isn't it? Sports cars sit at the top, and "cool" is the value that dominates. I don't think the market chasing "cuteness" is actually the biggest one out there. There's a world of elegance, things like Concours d'Elegance, but the benchmark that tends to actually filter down into products is the racing world. What happens when someone rooted in human-centered design steps into that world?

The Answer the Ford 021C Gave

To me, the Ford 021C is a genuinely beautiful, adorable concept car.

I think Jony Ive is the person who erased that feeling everyone had the first time they touched an early iPod or iMac — "computers used to be so chunky and boxy," "phones used to be so chunky." iPhones and iPods are cute. Especially the generations that still had a home button — that shape feels genuinely approachable. I think the Ford 021C is exactly an experiment in trying to make that same thing happen with a car.

It Also Fits Squarely Into the Historical Context of Car Design

What's interesting about this concept is that it clearly carries real intent even when you look at it through the lens of automotive design history.

Take Honda's MM philosophy, for example (Man-Maximum / Mechanism-Minimum — maximize space for people, minimize space for mechanics). Or the tradition of prioritizing livability that things like the Mini's FF layout represent. The Ford 021C sits at the end of that lineage, maximizing cabin space while packing the mechanical components compactly up front. It's a design that connects directly into the throughline of automotive design history.

Back to the Luce — My Honest Thoughts

I don't own a Ferrari. I'm just one person who loves industrial design, laying out my honest thoughts on the Luce.

1. A Missed Opportunity on Material Choice

The seats settled on Alcantara or leather. I'd have loved to see a proposal for a newer material, some other answer better suited to a car. Woven fabric, polyester, anything — I just wished they'd shown us more of what materials could do.

2. The Aluminum AC Vents Are the Same as the 021C — He Clearly Just Wanted to Do That

The aluminum vents in the Luce use the exact same design language as the Ford 021C. I got the sense that Newson simply thought, "I really did want to do this again."

3. Controls: the Problem of Tactile Feedback

One of the weak points of phones and computers is how weak tactile feedback tends to be. The reason PC keyboards still use physical keys, and laptop trackpads still give that "click" feedback when pressed, comes down to how important that sense of touch actually is.

Tesla consolidates its entire interface into a display, which is interesting and beautiful in its own way, but I sense that the Luce was trying to push back on that. Toggle switches embedded beneath the display — that fusion of "display plus physical switch" feels like exactly the point LoveFrom was trying to make. I really want to get my hands on the actual car and try it out.

4. Handing Too Much Customization Over to the User

On the official site, users can freely choose their own combinations of colors and materials, but I felt that this hands over too much to the user. Depending on the combination, it can end up too much, too busy, and land on a finish that just doesn't work. From an industrial designer's standpoint, giving that much freedom isn't a design decision I'm thrilled about.

5. Suicide Doors, But the Center Pillar Is Still There

Knowing LoveFrom, they surely wanted to eliminate both the center console and the center pillar. The Ford 021C had actually pulled that off. The Luce has suicide doors, yet there's still a pillar left standing in the middle. This might come down to structural rigidity requirements (crash-safety regulations), but it does weaken the whole point of going with suicide doors in the first place.

6. The Machined Aluminum Parts Don't Quite Blend With the Whole

Each machined aluminum piece is beautiful on its own, but when combined with the rest of the car, I felt the flowing beauty of the dashboard as a whole gets diluted. It gives an impression like "a pre-designed steering wheel was simply bolted onto the dashboard." I keep thinking Tesla's interior actually pulled off something more seamless and cohesive.

On the exterior, there's a lot to appreciate — the grid layout, the way the lines are organized — but that's hard to put into words on a podcast, so in the end, I think it comes down to personal taste.

A Philosophical Aside — "One-Person Tailoring" as the Ultimate Ideal

Looking at the Luce made me think again about how close the person who engineered the car body actually was to the person designing the interior. How close the concept and the designer really were to each other.

The thing I find most beautiful in making things is what's called "maru-nui" (one-person tailoring). It's a term from the world of tailoring, referring to a single craftsperson handling every step — measuring the customer, drafting the pattern, cutting, and sewing. I really do think that's the pinnacle.

With an industrial product, having one person handle every single step is impossible. But I do believe that, at the very least, the "concept" should be held together from start to finish by a single person, or by a team led clearly by one person. One designer per product, carrying the concept consistently from beginning to end, ideally through to the marketing as well. That's what beautiful making-of-things looks like, to me. I'm genuinely, if uselessly, curious what the internal situation actually looked like behind the Luce.

Ornament × Modernism — Value-Add and the Emotional Side of Design

One more thing that occurred to me was about the relationship between ornamentation and modern industrial design.

I think the peak era of ornamentation was the Art Nouveau and Art Deco era. The Arts and Crafts movement that followed was also, in its own way, about how to present ornamentation.

But viewed through the lens of modernism, ornamentation has a side to it that gets labeled "tacky" (this is intellectual history speaking, not my own opinion). Modernism's values — strip away decoration, tidy things up, less but more beautiful — sit slightly at odds with it.

And yet, luxury goods, high-value-add products, always, without fail, invest heavily in ornamentation. Ferrari, and luxury cars in general, didn't arrive at their shapes purely through aerodynamics. They carry forms that would be meaningless if you cared only about the act of driving.

Clothing is the same. Ornamentation that has nothing to do with warmth — collars, vents (center vent / side vents), stitching spaced 5mm apart on a lapel — elements that have no direct bearing on comfort, yet are culturally necessary.

Minimalism stripping away ornamentation in industrial design is rational, and it lines up with modernism both in cost and in beauty. But high-value-add products can never quite give up showing off through ornamentation.

Take Braun watches, for example. Ultimately simple, beautiful as design. But they never sit alongside a top-tier watch like a Rolex. Some of that comes down to the mechanics inside, but I think it's also because a certain degree of "tackiness," a certain ornamental quality, is actually necessary. Unlike a Vacheron Constantin, or one of the "cloud-level" watches with unusual ornamentation, Braun has something that can't quite be pulled all the way toward pure restraint.

No matter how functional something is, without an emotional dimension, it never gains real added value. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. We jumped all over the place today, but that, including my own sense of design, was really what I wanted to talk about.

About coiai Inc.

We're about at time again this week. I want to keep this going every Monday as much as I can.

coiai Inc. works in the following areas:

Put simply, we "can do just about anything," but what we're truly aiming for is to build things that are more beautiful, more usable, and more emotionally resonant. We put everything we have into the making.

Projects that other companies turned down, projects where the quote felt too high, and of course, especially projects where you're thinking "I want this made better, made more beautiful" — those are exactly the ones we'd love for you to trust us with. Quotes are always free, so please feel free to reach out.

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What Anthropic's Report and Ferrari's First EV, the "Luce," Reveal About Design | coiai Inc.