You can dread the future or help build it. The people who come through this already chose. While panic around what AI means for our industry is the reflex right now, calm is a decision. The calm that comes from knowing what you actually know is the rarest and most valuable thing you can bring to …
Year: 2026
How I stopped dreading AI and started studying it full-time
By June 2026, I couldn’t open an app without being told I was falling behind. My Instagram saves were full of designers building agents over a weekend. LinkedIn was a steady stream of people who had “shipped it with Cursor.” And the job listings I was tailoring my resume to kept asking for things like …
A founder with a tool is not a founder with a clue
Somewhere in this room is the one person who can tell if any of it is actually good. AI made everyone else look exactly like them. AI lets a solo founder produce a product, but it can’t help them understand whether that product is actually good…yet. That expertise, the hard-won judgment underneath it, has always been …
Nobody wants your AI app
The switchboard operator’s job was automated out of existence. The work it became, the invisible systems that now connect every call, is worth more than the job ever was. AI is about to do the same thing to the app. The people buying AI are blunt about the fact that the future is intelligence that disappears …
Bounded delegation: How much authority should AI have?
A practical model for deciding what AI can do, what humans must still own, and where product teams should draw the boundary. Image created by the author with OpenAI image generation. An AI tool clusters hundreds of customer comments and names the largest theme “pricing friction”. The label sounds plausible, so the team asks it …
Five-step color balancing with GenAI
Gemini & Qualitative Data Color Scheme Design Continue reading on UX Collective » Why an earnings test raises uncomfortable questions about art, professional practice, and the value of a degree. Image source: Adobe Stock The Price of a Degree The federal government has decided to ask a question higher education has long avoided. What is a degree worth? …
Why the best resume may be the wrong resume for a design team
What design leadership gets wrong about experience, expertise, and innovation on a team. Continue reading on UX Collective » A design lead walks a nervous new hire through their first critique. AI Assisted. Every senior designer was once a bet someone made. The generation of judgment the field needs in ten years depends on leaders …
What Shakespeare got wrong about AI
He wrote about a magic you could always stop. We built the kind that gets loose. He understood us better than science fiction ever has. The one thing he couldn’t imagine was what we actually built. Shakespeare’s magic always had an off switch. Somebody could summon it and shut it down. It wore off on its own, …
What Shakespeare got right about AI
From ink and quill to glowing code: Shakespeare’s exploration of prophecy and equivocation, the art of speaking truths that mislead, anticipates the central challenge of our own relationship with artificial intelligence. Every warning we need about AI was written four hundred years ago. What witches, a forged letter, and a haunted prince can teach you …
When the canvas starts acting, who’s really in control?
How agentic interfaces are changing what designers control, from interactions to agency, orchestration and attention. Agentic canvas can now brings context from across tools into one place, then acts on it without needing step by step instructions. AI-generated visual, Aurélie Radom ©. For most of the history of software, the interface has been the place where …