( Thoughts )
Making it got cheap. Judging it did not.
Written while the work was going on, published as they were finished. Design systems, logistics interfaces, and the part of the job that still needs somebody who can tell right from finished.
Congratulations, your CEO is now the designer
Congratulations, your CEO is now the designer. Also the devops engineer, the support desk, the copywriter and, on a good week, the brand team. Nobody got fired. The roles just quietly moved into one person's browser tab, and the org chart got a lot tidier.
Your clickable prototype is already late
This year's hiring advice for designers: retire the static case study, show clickable prototypes and video walkthroughs instead. Solid advice. It would have been ahead of the curve a few years ago.
Twice is too late
A new report says half of surveyed designers shipped AI-generated code to production this year. The comments split neatly into two camps: "designers are engineers now" and "the sky is falling". Both camps are staring at the code. The code was never the risk.
You bought a suite. You got six apps.
Private equity spent the last eighteen months buying field service software. Vertical SaaS ran 46 to 54 percent of all SaaS M&A between January 2025 and May 2026. The deal announcements all say "platform". The users, meanwhile, are still relearning how a table works every time they click from leads into invoicing.
It looks fine. That's the problem.
Every other post in my feed this month is someone who built an entire SaaS over a weekend with one prompt. Congratulations to all of them. I shipped a fifteen-module application in ten days this month, designed and built through an AI workflow, and that is exactly why I do not believe most of them.
The model was never the bottleneck
Every week someone announces that AI can now generate your entire design system, and every week the comments argue about which model does it best. I spent three months doing this on a real production system. I can save everyone some time: it is not the model.
A paper form on a phone is still a paper form
The US home care industry is worth over $100 billion, and a surprising amount of it still runs on spreadsheets, phone calls and paper. Somewhere right now a coordinator is matching a caregiver to a client by working down a list of who is free, because "free" is the only criterion there is ever time to check.
A better feed is still a feed
Most of my portfolio is trucks, dispatch boards and enterprise tables. So naturally the project that taught me the most about product strategy was a place to play Magic: The Gathering on a livestream. With real cardboard.
I used to push pixels. Now I push back.
Twenty years ago I was pushing pixels for whoever paid the invoice. Today I get paid to have opinions, which my younger self would have found both suspicious and deeply unfair.
Nobody hands their fleet to a black box
Every pitch for AI in logistics has the same slide: the one where the dispatchers vanish and the trucks route themselves. It is a lovely slide. Nobody who has ever run a fleet believes it.
( Next )
Disagree with one of these
Most of them started as an argument I was losing, or one I was still having when I wrote it down. If a piece is wrong, the useful thing to do with it is say so.