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Defining Experience · Jan 19, 2026

DX Perspective: What I No Longer Believe, Design Is More Than Code, and Building Virtual Worlds

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Rachel Kobetz · Defining Experience

Hi all!

Here’s your weekly dose of DX Perspective, a list of what I’m exploring and thinking about. Feel free to forward this along to friends.

  • What I No Longer Believe About Design Leadership – For a long time, I believed leadership was about accumulating better answers. Clearer frameworks. Stronger principles. More refined models for how design should operate inside a complex organization. What actually changed my leadership wasn’t what I learned. It was what I stopped believing.

  • Inside Fei-Fei Li’s Plan to Build AI-Powered Virtual Worlds – Recent AI progress has followed a pattern. Across text, image, audio, and video, once the right technical foundations were discovered, it only took a few years for AI-generated outputs to go from merely passable to indistinguishable from human creation. Although it’s early, recent advances suggest that virtual worlds—3D environments you can explore and interact with—could be next.

  • Design is more than code by Karri Saarinen, Linear – Designing with code is a recurring discussion, and it’s flared up again. I’ve written about it twice now. Design as a search, not a pipeline. How tools carry opinions, and how those opinions shape what feels “reasonable” to attempt. Why constraints that arrive too early can close off possibilities before you’ve had a chance to find them. I’m skeptical of the industry’s drive toward grand unification, collapsing a nuanced process into code and calling it progress.

  • 12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+ – There is much fear and discussion about job loss as a result of AI, but the (often young and fearless) AI-native talent that is most aggressively engaging with new tech has a fascinating advantage in the current workforce.

  • Building Product Sense: Why Your Gut Needs an Education – When AI researchers started obsessing over “taste” last year, I had to laugh. They’d discovered what product people have known forever: the ability to quickly distinguish good from bad, elegant from clunky, valuable from worthless. They just gave it a fancier name.

  • Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers – There are Good Product Managers and there are Great Product Managers. There are also Okay Product Managers and Bad Product Managers, but we will focus on the Good and the Great here.

  • The Killer Feature (That Wins the AI wars?) by Tara Tan – This could be the killer feature that wins the LLM wars. Yesterday, Google rolled out “Personal Intelligence” for Gemini Pro and Ultra users in the US.

  • Where is Design Heading? By Mark Curtis – I’ve been part of the story of digital design in the 30 or so years since the Internet began to intertwine with our lives, and many of us realised that this technology needed to be designed.

  • The Palantir Model – I’ve been chewing on something for a few weeks now and I can’t quite spit it out, so I’m going to do what I always do when that happens: write my way through it and see what comes out the other side.

  • The Relentless Pursuit of Frictionless Design – For the last decade, the design industry has rallied behind a single, unwavering mantra: Remove friction. There has been a fixation with “single-click” experiences and “seamless” flows. Interfaces are polished until they become weightless, often forgettable, and sometimes sterile.

  • The Non-Shared Baseline – Last week, Cursor announced AI-powered visual editing and design Twitter erupted. We’ve been here before.

  • The End of Dashboards and Design Systems by Michal Malewicz – Design systems were built to scale manual interface creation. They’re now content fodder for AI.

  • The Product Model at Google - Silicon Valley Product Group – Google was one of the earliest product model companies, and in this article we hope to show the essential elements of this model, and how they manifest at Google, and how this model has been key to its ability to scale to over 180,000 employees.

  • Future Tense: Why we struggle to think about the future – Nick Foster, RDI, FRSA argues that, while we’re preoccupied with imagining what lies ahead, we’re surprisingly poor at thinking about the future with rigour.

  • Makers vs. Marketers by Rei Inamoto – “After all, we’re makers.” I hear this from executives at clients, particularly of Japanese brands. The comment carries pride—but also anxiety. They’re good at making things, not selling them.

  • Why Design, Not Scale, Will Decide the Future of AI – The AI industry has a new religion: scale. Technology-focused industries are obsessed with numbers. Bigger models, more GPUs, and exponential growth seem to take priority. However, Gleb Kuznetsov presents a radically different perspective, one in which the infrastructure behind AI requires better design, not more power.

  • The Stanford HAI Stories that Defined AI in 2025 – Readers wanted to know if their therapy chatbot could be trusted, whether their boss was automating the wrong job, and if their private conversations were training tomorrow’s models.

  • Researchers Are Rewriting the Playbook with AI – When AI burst onto the scene, it sparked a mix of curiosity, excitement, and a little bit of anxiety for many of us. What does this mean for our work? Where can it truly help? What should remain human?

  • Keep making (AI will not save you) – AI is a paradox. (and will likely remain this way for the near future). Despite my best efforts, I still waver between bullish optimism (glass half full), where AI superpowers work, freeing up time for Designers to make more, and rapidly scale rad shit in the world, to bearish pessimism (glass half empty), where AI squeezes creativity, reduces opportunity, and destroys the planet.

  • Perplexity and NotebookLM don’t use better AI—they use better intelligence flow architecture – Everyone thinks Perplexity and NotebookLM succeed because they use “better AI.” They don’t. They use the same models as everyone else. I spent three months deconstructing both — not just as a user, but as an architect. I mapped where intelligence lives, traced where humans direct and where AI executes.

  • Double Click: What Does It Mean To Be A Designer In The Age Of AI? – Read our report, which quantifies this shift and explores what it means for you and your team. In a world where anyone can design and develop a working app, why do titles even exist? It’s a question we hear more and more often. We explored the rise of the generalist earlier this year, asking whether dot-connecting could be more impactful than deep domain expertise.

  • A new navigation paradigm – Is AI truly eliminating navigation, or is it simply shifting its agent and form?

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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

Read the original on kobewan.substack.com ↗

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