Hi all —
Here’s your weekly dose of DX Perspective: what I’m noticing, saving, and thinking about as design (and leadership) gets rewired for an AI-native world. If something here makes you pause, forward it to a friend and tell them why.
I thought I knew Product Design. Then I joined an AI team. — A product designer on a GenAI team describes how their practice shifts when AI becomes part of the product’s foundation—moving beyond a deterministic lens into models, datasets, and feedback loops beneath the UI.
‘We just have to experiment faster’: AI’s changed design forever. Now what? — Mark Wilson drops into Cursor to see Baby Cursor, a prototype built in a week that tries to make the tool the most simple thing and the most crazy thing all at once—prompt-first, agentic, and fluid from tiny assistant to full workstation.
The De-Evolution of a Business (Todd Bracher) — On “contemporization”: evolving a business to meet today’s conditions without abandoning what made it matter, because the failure mode isn’t dramatic collapse, it’s slow drift backward disguised as holding steady.
The Brand Age — A quartz-crisis origin story: when telling exact time became a commodity, surviving Swiss watchmakers transformed from precision instrument makers into luxury brands—brand as what’s left when substantive differences disappear.
Something big “might” be happening — A reaction to Matt Shumer’s “weather report” from the AI frontlines (AI replacing most screen-based work), written from the perspective of a designer who’s been rebuilding their portfolio and shipping apps with Next.js, v0, and vibe-coding tools.
A Design Turn (Jon Kolko) — A provocative thesis: we’re shifting from design-as-making to design-as-literacy — fewer makers, more people who can critique designed systems.
OpenClaw: Our Comprehensive Guide for Beginners (Every) — Starts with: what if AI could give any individual the firepower of a large team at a fraction of the cost? Then walks through “Claws” as proactive personal assistants you text like a friend—quietly running in the background with rules you set.
AI Must Embrace Specialization (SAI) — arXiv — Everyone is talking about AGI, yet they don’t agree on what it means. The paper argues AI must embrace specialization (not generality) and proposes Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence (SAI).
Jonathan Arena on the Intelligent Web — If the medium itself is shifting, what should design schools be teaching? A profile following Arena from design leadership into founding New Generation, building AI-powered storefronts for retail brands.
I Watched 6 AI Agents Design an App Together And It Blew My Mind (YouTube) — Tom Krcha (CEO of Pencil) demos “swarm mode” and what it looks like to watch six agents design a beautiful app in real time—plus how Pencil works under the hood (a simple JSON file) and how it plugs into Cursor/Claude Code workflows.
Double Diamond – Jenny Wen (Anthropic) on designing Claude — Great on designing probabilistic systems: primitives over flows, and calibrating trust + transparency as models improve.
Becoming an AI-native designer (Kris Puckett, YouTube) — Behind the scenes of Kris’s Epilogue app, plus a practical walkthrough of creating custom skills with Claude Code and starting to build personal systems with AI.
Felix Rieseberg on Claude Cowork + task execution — Claude Cowork came out of an accident: the team noticed Claude Code being used for messy knowledge work (not just coding). The line is blurring, and the real frontier is trusted task execution, not better chat.
Convergence — Future Today Strategy Group — The convergence era has begun: technologies, capital, geopolitics, climate, and human behavior collide. Pitched as a playbook for leaders willing to practice “creative destruction on purpose”—dismantle what worked yesterday before the world does it for you.
Design in Tech Report 2026 (John Maeda): UX → AX — We are moving from UX to AX: agents act on a user’s behalf, so the design problem shifts from helping people do things to helping people know whether it was done well—gulf of execution → gulf of evaluation.
Stop Talking To AI — You’ve been lied to about how AI works. The thesis: conversation demos well, but declarative intent + structured coordination is what makes AI feel like Jarvis (run the analysis) rather than endless chat-as-management.
How Coding Agents Are Reshaping Engineering, Product and Design — “I think the traditional PRD process (PRD → mock → code) is dead. But text that describes product requirements is very much alive.”
The Rise of the Product Builder (Jason Cyr) — The concept of the “product builder” is replacing the designer/developer split faster than anyone expected; the walls between roles aren’t just thinning, they’re gone.
How we design when the code writes itself (Fin / Intercom) — Part of “Acquired Taste,” exploring AI productivity and human taste. Sets the stakes with Intercom’s stat: 90% of pull requests are authored by Claude Code—so when ability isn’t the bottleneck, intent and judgement become the gatekeepers.
Fonttrio — font pairings for shadcn — Ready-made font combinations for shadcn/ui projects: heading, body, and mono fonts with a complete scale, plus ready-to-use CSS variables and an installable package.
Rebrand.gallery — A “stellar visual identity inspiration gallery”: curated design systems, visual identity introductions, and rebrand videos.
Stitch (Google) — Design with AI — Google’s Stitch (beta): design with AI from prompts or sketches into UI (with projects and examples right on the site).
How top companies are using AI in their design workflows — A roundup of how senior designers and creative teams are operationalizing AI across UX, interaction, motion, and marketing—pulled from interviews and public process breakdowns (with Meta + Atlassian called out).
Anthropic Courses — A structured library of courses spanning Claude 101, Claude Code in Action, Intro to Claude Cowork, Building with the Claude API, and Model Context Protocol (plus advanced topics, skills, and subagents).
DLS is where design leaders sharpen their strategy, expand their influence, and lead at the highest level. Whether you’re scaling operations, navigating executive leadership, or mapping your next career move — these cohort-based programs give you the frameworks and community to drive real impact.
New: DLS Executive is open for the next cohort, running June 1–11.
And please give me feedback. Which content is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a great weekend.
Rachel
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