All Design, No AI
I am very tired of the AI posts on LinkedIn—especially the AI bro posts. There are many flavors of these cringe posts, but the cringest ones are the ones that claim that solo designers will replace entire product teams in a couple of months.
Such posts tell me a couple of things:
- The poster has never been in a good design team. They either only did very last layer pixel work, or they have been handed such work and took it to be what design is.
- The poster has never worked with a good product team. I see so many "product" teams who just carry tickets between different teams who actually do the work. Or you see "product people" who just do what the boss says and quietly craft plans to deflect responsibility when things go, expectedly, in a shitty direction.
- The poster has so little IT/computing experience that they do not understand how vibe-coded artifacts are created. They are in awe when they see something that is clickable, in so much awe that they can't even notice that the clickable thing completely fails at important decision points, which are quickly labeled as "oh edge cases."
- They may be benefiting from this cheerleading, but unlikely. They have probably burnt thousands of dollars in token credits to get to something barely useful, usable. But ahem no they are in the learning process, so they amend their LinkedIn title to include "|🕯️Enthusiastic learner | ". They do that because "Shaken keriz" does not sound as professional.
- Why is it always the solo designers replacing product teams? If the job is as easy as typing stuff into a cozy opaque command-line and enjoying outputs instead of thinking, why can't engineers replace product teams; why designers? Why not marketing? Why not call center operations? Why not my nephew?
This is a waste of everyone's time.
That is why I will not share any AI-related content in this issue. I am hoping that this will be an inspiration for you to stop focusing only on AI and shift your attention back to thinking about, and hopefully improving in experience design fundamentals.
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Here is my prophecy: If the LLM evangelism continues at this rate, there will be so many projects that look OK as screenshots but explode on first click. The makers of these will not realize how bad their product is until after they launch, so they'll start asking another LLM about what is wrong. The LLM will suggest UX improvements. The maker will not understand half of these suggestions. They will not be able to implement half of the remaining half using their non-existent coding skills. This is when they will need to seek design consultancy. I think agencies are going to come back, and/or the design community is about to experience its Y2K/COBOL programmer moment.
Onto the reads, thanks for coming by!