Notes

https://thecursormag.substack.com/p/the-ai-to-ui-trap

low AI adoption among designers might be self-preservation, I mean something more than protecting our job. I mean preserving the idea that design is a thinking discipline, not an output discipline.

Spent hours trying to integrate AI into a freelance branding project. Final direction came from pen and paper. The tools are still pretty bad at this kind of work.

Helping plan my kid’s entrepreneur week and most parents just want the simplest, most generic product so they can move on. Mismatched drive is what makes team projects a nightmare.

Design done with defaults and prompts is already detected miles away. The difference between designers will be the discipline of continuing to do the work, without shortcuts.

It is incredible how after so many years the figure of Michael Jackson as an artist continues to attract new generations, children imitating his footsteps, screams and outfits. There really hasn’t been anything like it.

The weirdest flex right now is “I one-shotted this with AI.”

Cool. So can a stranger who types a similar sentence.

One-shotting means the output required zero judgment. Zero editing. Zero taste. You skipped the entire part that makes it yours. The work is everything that happens after the first result.

Local coffee shop ended up blocking all the electric outlets they setup initially to avoid people staying working.

While I can see it how holding a table for long spans of time is a problem I believe there should be better ways to handle people that say for long without consuming.

Current status

Testing my new setup to be able to post to my site, X and Bluesky at the same time. For a 2nd time.

Generative UI is getting hyped as the future of software and it’s starting to feel like “voice will kill screens” all over again.

If every user sees a different interface:

• How does support work?
• How do you write help docs?

People actually like standards. You learn one app and carry that muscle memory to the next. That’s not a limitation, that’s how humans work.

There’s also an assumption that users know exactly what they need and can articulate it clearly. We know that’s not true.

The sweet spot is probably 80% well-designed UI for everyday tasks, 20% AI for the long tail.

But that’s not the future of software.

That’s a good feature.