Essays on building products - and on what AI really changes for the work, from practice rather than hype. Written by a practitioner, for practitioners.
“I’m good at complex systems” is on my CV, and I’d never written down what I actually meant by it. Working that out turned into this: complexity doesn’t disappear when you simplify, it moves to someone. Larry Tesler named three places it can go - the user, the product team, the platform team - and every one of them could refuse. We’ve added a fourth that can’t, mostly without deciding to.
Months of designing and building real products with AI coding agents kept surfacing the same problems - not random bugs, but predictable ones. They’re not defects to fix; they’re characteristics of the tool. On sycophancy, confident hallucination, solution-racing, moved effort and eroded judgment - and the test I use to tell a constraint worth adding from ceremony.
Over the last couple of months I finally had the time - and the mental space - to slow down and look at where I am as a designer after more than 11 years in product and UX roles. A reflection on burnout, fundamentals, AI, and why sometimes the most progressive thing you can do is go back to basics.
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