"Accelerating" alignment is anti-design
Curating our workloads is also part of "design taste". Settling for low-hanging fruit is bad design.
The fake double diamond is dead. The real double diamond is immortal.
AI is not a substitute for divergent thinking, and the false certainty it gives will never save you from having to iterate.
LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.
The more we focus on a particular technology, the more we lose sight of what normal people actually care about.
Assigning agency to AI means surrendering your own
Claude is not a colleague, collaborator, or sentient being. It is a SaaS product.
Sense-making is only productive when it is collective
The "optimization" you achieve by automating interfaces between colleagues is always going to be self-defeating.
AI hypervigilance is now an omnipresent cognitive load for your users
AI may make your job easier, but that effort has just been shifted onto your users. They are noticing it and they hate it.
No amount of velocity can shield your team from opportunity cost
Alternate title: "LLMs can't fix your shitty internal culture"
Cognitive Pollution: Real knowledge only forms through doing the work
What if the cure for getting a grip on this moment wasn't a pound of artificial intelligence, but an ounce of the natural variety?
AI is not a substitute for knowing how to run software projects
Despite execs' best hopes for automating their own jobs, technology will always remain downstream of decision-making.
Thoughtless features never add up to a thoughtful product
Your first idea for how to solve a problem is most likely to be a low-impact hack. Delightful user experiences require a higher level of thinking.
Empathy and delight mean nothing when the software is disrespectful
Software is now something we do TO users, instead of something that we make FOR them.
Trust is not built on craft alone
No amount of tooling will let product teams move faster than being trusted to own their process. That trust is earned through rigor rather than mere velocity.
Even with a silver bullet, you still have to aim
Productivity gains among frontline employees can't counteract the abdication of responsibility at the executive level.
The glassholes are back, thanks to AI
Recording people without consent — once seen as a brazen privacy violation — has become thoughtlessly routine, both in meetings and on the street.
Product teams struggled to create intent. AI let them think they could skip it.
Don't mistake product delivery for the finish line. It's just the start of the race.
Feedback loops require real feedback. AI drives it underground.
The methods we take for granted have load-bearing requirements that have already gone extinct in many organizations.
The future of UX design is not a higher-velocity version of its present
Scaling the rate at which we fiddle around the edges of a system will never translate into meaningful transformation of that system.
AI is not the future of software development, but the last dying gasp of the past
The industry has been building careers and business models around solving the very problems it created. But the conditions that once made this possible are breaking down.
The newest term in the AI lexicon is "interpassivity"
The industry is reorienting around software that uses itself. But giving ourselves permission to lean back and relax merely indulges an old and toxic tendency.
The illiterate organization
Even the most actionable insight will never be acted upon when coherence has broken down.