Writing
Field notes on
design and AI.
What AI speeds up, what it can't replace, and how design leaders make the shift work. Written from building with it every week.
- Field notes · October 17, 2026 Design laws for people building with AI Stop telling AI to 'make it look better.' Each design law here comes with the before, the after, and the exact words to give your AI so it fixes the real problem. Updated with every new episode.
- Field notes · October 17, 2026 GPT-6 now designs its own answers. A UX designer's take. ChatGPT's new Intelligent UI turns answers into buttons, forms, charts and small tools. What OpenAI got right is a design system and restraint. The risk is the oldest one in interface design: when everything is loud, nothing is.
- Field notes · October 14, 2026 I gave an AI agent my design system. Here's what broke. I handed a fresh AI coding agent the Nova design system and one prompt. It followed the color rules perfectly and still exposed five gaps in the system. Here's what I changed, and what happened when a second agent tried again.
- Field notes · October 10, 2026 Count the audience: who can actually see this? "Only staff can see it" sounded safe until I counted: staff was 17 of 31 people. Permissions in plain English, the bugs that taught me, and the habits (with prompts) that catch them early.
- Field notes · October 10, 2026 Nobody tells you when it breaks. My walking game sat on the App Store doing nothing for weeks, and nothing told me. Here's why AI-built apps fail quietly, and the five habits I use so I hear about it first.
- Field notes · October 10, 2026 What leaves your app can't be taken back. My automated tests cleaned up perfectly and reported green. They'd also been sending notifications to real people's phones for months. On emails, pushes and payments: the part of your app you can't undo.
- Field notes · October 10, 2026 When the AI says it's fixed, it isn't yet. The most expensive word in AI-assisted building is "fixed." Here's why it's so often wrong, the loop it traps people in, and the seven habits (with prompts) I use to get out.
- Essay · October 8, 2026 Vibe coding gets you a demo. Here's what it takes to ship a product. AI can make something that looks finished in an afternoon. Getting from that prototype to software real people rely on is a different story, and it's one designers can learn to tell.
- Essay · October 7, 2026 The hopeful case for designers working with AI A lot of designers are bracing for AI to take their jobs. From leading a design team and building my own products with AI agents, I see something different: anyone can make things now, but making them good is still rare, and the job is getting bigger. Here's what's changing, what stays ours, and what to watch out for.
- Field notes · October 6, 2026 I built a real app with AI agents. Here's what my design skills were for. AI agents wrote the code. The design work didn't go away; it moved. What I learned shipping 43 test builds of an app real people use every week.