Nik (00:06)
Welcome to AI and Design, where we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. I'm Nick Martellero.

Dan (00:11)
And I'm Dan Saffer, and we're faculty at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Each week, we break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.

Nik (00:30)
Whether you're a designer working on AI or an AI practitioner interested in design, we're glad you're here. On today's episode, we'll be discussing Anthropix Jenny Wen, being back with a provocative new interview laying out three kinds of designers that she's excited to hire.

Dan (00:45)
Nicole Alexander Michaelis says designers should be crushing it right now

Nik (00:50)
And finally, Martin Wright talks about the pressure of keeping up with AI right now, something a lot of our listeners will surely empathize with.

Dan (00:58)
I'm sensing a theme this week. So let's talk about Jenny Wen's new interview. Last time we heard from her back in September with her blockbuster talk called Don't Trust the Design Process. So what wisdom is she dropping now?

Nik (01:15)
Jenny's on a new podcast with Lenny and she does bring back up the idea that process is dead and really talking about how a lot has changed within, especially the process that she's using at Anthropic, moving away from say mocking up wireframing and really actually building prototypes and then moving very, very quickly into production. And of course we've seen that if you are an Anthropic user, if you use

if you use Cloud code, you use cowork, you're seeing that they are shipping stuff super rapidly and they are designing basically new ways for us to work really quickly. The thing that I thought was super interesting about this new interview though was Jenny's thoughts on three types of designers that she's excited to hire. First off, I was like, great, we're still hiring designers. And this is coming straight from someone who's working right in the middle of AI building AI systems.

And so that's great. And the three types were this block-shaped designer, the deep-T specialist, and this new kind of idea of the cracked new grad. Dan, do you want to talk a little bit about these different kind of archetypes that Jenny's talking about?

Dan (02:25)
Sure, I tend to think of myself as being a block shape designer, but I don't think that that's what she's really talking about here. So the first one is, this block shape designer. And the idea here is that rather than a T-shaped designer or a comb shape designer, it is someone that is really good at a lot of different things.

She says like, it's like 80 % is able to do like most of the tasks really well. So an 80 % designer who is working on design and code and, all these other things that make up the design process. The second one is this like deep T designer where the, you've got a lot of skills at the top, but then the

bottom part of the T stretches really long into one kind of specialty and she gives the example of something like iconography or animation or those kinds of things where you are a real specialist down in that length of the T. And then the third kind is the cracked new grad.

Which I at first thought was craft new grad, but no it's it's a cool kid thing So it's the cracked new grad and the idea here is that it's someone fresh out of school Able to learn things quickly isn't overburdened with the old design process is willing to kind of jump in and just try things and Make as quickly as possible. So really

An interesting spread there. One that we've sort of talked about off and on during this podcast And I had kind of really thought about the kind of the first two in my musings of this where it's like, well, you're either probably going to be a, deep generalist or you're going to be a super specialist. When I was thinking of the length of the T

I was thinking also you could be not just in a process, but in an industry as well, or in a specific domain where it's like, yeah, I really know medical, or I really know consumer electronics, or I really know whatever it is that real deep domain specific knowledge. But the one that I was excited to see was this cracked new grad one where it's you're just coming into the industry and

You're hungry and you're excited and you're building and exploring and building things and launching them just to see what happens. really that really set my mind spinning, particularly, since you and I are both teaching these cracked new grads, how I'm going tweak my courses to make it fit this new world.

And so I thought that was really interesting and exciting to hear.

Nik (05:21)
Yeah, I'm a really big fan of Jenny's thinking here on this. I'll say that this concept of the cracked new grad is definitely near and dear to my heart, partly because I'm teaching a new class called the AI augmented designer. We're teaching students how to use AI tools to basically amplify and augment their process. But so much of it is basically, and I'm really upfront as I don't know the answers here. Tools are changing every week.

And so really what the course is about is you having an opportunity to try out new things, try out new process, try out new tools, and then figure out what works for you. And then ultimately sit back after you've created a bunch of stuff, reflect a little bit and say, am I making something good? Like that's the big thing I want. And I think that's one of the things here that

you know, across what we're seeing maybe a lot of discussion in this is like people still want to have great design just because you're using AI, just because you're using new processes or you're breaking process. You're saying, well, we're not going to do it the old way. It's like, okay, but we still want great design at the end of the day. And so, you know, how you get there though, I think is something that every designer has to figure out on their own. The thing that's exciting about it in a way though, is that I do like this like, ⁓ actually now we can, we can

be a little more experimental with our process. We can be a little more experimental our tools. And maybe we go back to saying, what is it that you really bring to this team? And then that's how people are going to be evaluated. Not that maybe that went away, but I'm excited by that. And then I'm excited too, just the fact that Jenny's talking about hire new grads. mean, again, we're maybe biased here. We're teaching a lot of these people.

We know that our students, we know that young people in the design field everywhere are little worried about job opportunities, but the fact that this is coming out saying, no, mean, you have the right mindset and really, you're open to learn, you're open to experiment, you're open to see where things are gonna go, that we're looking to hire you, I'm excited to see that. I hope people in the industry are also maybe some of that mindset is shifting and they're excited to hire new people too.

Dan (07:22)
Yeah, I really hope so. And I've been talking to a bunch of industry leaders lately and it does feel like there is this slight shift happening where people are very interested in getting people who are, I don't want to use the term AI native, but people that don't have the, don't have the five to 10 years of,

or 20 years, in my case of design process that's kind of holding them back from trying out new things. And so I think it is a very hopeful sign. And I think the reason why these interviews with Jenny or her talks kind of go more viral and that people are talking about them like we are right here is

That is great to see someone exposing what is happening at one of these big firms because it is it kind of seems like a black box and you're kind of like, well, if these people are doing it on the cutting edge, is that where my job is going to be when I graduate from school or what my job is going to be six months from now or my job is going to be a year from now or.

A couple of years from now, if you're working in a slow or heavily regulated industry. So I really think that that's where a lot of the excitement comes from. And for me listening to this it's amazing to hear her say things like, Hey, like in three months, this could all be different. And so it's that like explorer, like figure things out kind of mindset. That's so important. And.

how much of her job in the last year has shifted from doing a lot more prototypes and mocks a year ago to a lot more of working with engineers and building and polishing and refining instead of doing these kind of mocks and prototypes and like multi-year.

⁓ vision roadmaps, it's a lot more fast, it's a lot more rapid, it's a lot more, build, learn, go back to the drawing board. And I think that that kind of stuff is really interesting to hear about. And, I should say, and unnerving for people who are like, well, my design process hasn't changed that much or.

Nik (09:44)
Yeah, I agree.

Dan (09:52)
my design process isn't nearly this evolved. And I think that's, I think that's okay. And we'll talk about this a little later in the episode when we get to Martin's essay, but yeah, I mean, it is, it is cool to get a glimpse of how someone at a cutting edge company is doing things right.

Nik (10:11)
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that it is cool. actually, the exciting thing here is maybe, again, with this little motivation of this sort of idea of a cracked new grad, and also, the fact that you and I were trying to teach students, I'm really impressed also with how fast students will learn. Like, they can pick up new tools, because they're working in right now, they have this opportunity to work in a non-consequential environment.

Right? They're class projects, they're not real products in the sense that like, they're going to cost millions of dollars. They're not putting, putting pushed into production. You're not going to break a user experience and make customers run away from your product. Right? Everything right now, you have this great opportunity to really explore, to explore what your style is, to explore how your process works, to explore these new tools. And, you know, I'm super like,

excited for students to be able to like look at this as their opportunity to really figure out what it is that maybe will be new about our field. Actually, I have students who have, you know, asked me, hey Nick, have you read this article about something last year in my class? Actually, someone's like, Nick, have you read about this, you know, N8N, which is a tool to basically make agent systems. It's kind of a no code tool. And I was like, yeah, no, I've seen it. I was like, are we going to learn anything about it? And I was like, well, I didn't have it in the plan, but why not?

So I put together a lecture, showed it in class, got the students using it. A couple people took it up. Well, it turns out actually this student showed this in a job interview and to a pretty large company and they hadn't seen it. Their interviews hadn't seen this and they're like, I didn't even know you could do this. And so this is a thing actually to the students out there, this is an opportunity for you to also be showcasing what you know how to do and what you can do.

because you're empowered by maybe some of these new tools, this new process that you're developing for yourself. And then for those who are out there hiring, like I might actually recommend if you're interviewing people, like learn what people are doing. mean, steal what they're doing, like, cause you can learn a lot too and see what's working.

Dan (12:11)
Yeah, don't steal students work.

Nik (12:13)
No, I'm sorry, still their work, still their process. Yeah.

Dan (12:14)
Hire them, hire them, don't steal their work.

Nik (12:17)
Fair enough, fair enough, yeah. Sorry, maybe I'm looking in on that great artist steal quote. But no, I mean, I think this is an opportunity for people who are hiring for interviewing, try to learn about the process that students are using today. What are they working with? What tools are they working with?

Dan (12:38)
One of the interesting things, speaking of tools, was all about how she is still using Figma. And we talked about this a little bit last week about how you can use Figma definitely for that kind of overview that is very hard to get if you're just using Claude or a coding tool. You don't get the overview. And she mentioned that and I really thought that was really great.

But what really surprised me was how she was saying like, I use this because I can do so many more different variations before I ever get to Claude, which is funny because we often think like, well, you can just spin out a whole bunch of different variations in code, but maybe it is actually, and according to Jenny, is faster.

to be doing a lot of different variations and explorations in a tool like Figma before you ever get to Claude. And so I thought that that was a really interesting insight into her process. And I thought it completely validated what we were saying last week. So kudos to us and.

to her for validating us. But I thought that having that split of Canvas and code is still a very valuable thing because you hear lot of right now, like people being like, I don't go to Figma at all. I don't even care about that. I'm going straight to code, you know, and which is fine, I think if you're doing like a personal project or something small, but

Maybe not when you are working at bigger scale or ⁓ at a bigger company or when it has to fit in with a bigger design system. And I think to your point, Nick, people still want things that are well designed. They don't care how it was built necessarily. They care about is it a good design? And some of that good design is consistency.

thinking through all those edge cases and having a good information architecture and that the UX and stuff works. And I think that is where Figma still is bringing some value into this process.

I mean, the big thing that's going to be talked about here and the big thing that was talked about in her previous talk is that this classic design process of, the double diamond and converging and diverging and stuff like that I mean, she's saying it's kind of out the window.

And a lot of people are saying, hey, it's kind of out the window.

this has just been something I've been wrestling with is, you what do you teach students? How do you start to really think about what this new design process is that we're going through? And some of the things I liked that she was talking about was, you know, this idea of building.

What sounds like building like very kind of MVP things, getting them out there, learning and slowly making them better. She says that you can put stuff out there fast and just abandon it and that's going to destroy your brand eventually. But this idea of like incremental improvement. And I've definitely seen that with a lot of AI.

projects including my beloved notebook LM where they put out a basic thing and now it slowly over time has just been getting better and better with more and more features and is more and more capable both from a feature point of view but also from the model point of view and I really like that style of of building and

designing and shipping. reminds me of the old, you you want a cake, but hey, let's start with a cupcake.

Nik (16:30)
⁓ Jenny often talks about how, ⁓ the old process is dead or the process that we were talked about as gospel or whatever. Like, I have a question. did you, did you ever work that way as a designer? Like, were you ever like wedded to the process in that way?

Dan (16:46)
No, I mean, I think there is definitely an understanding that the design process as it is taught in schools is very idealized and that sometimes you come up with a great idea right up front and it works but sometimes you don't. I always felt that process was there as a support when you didn't know what to do next.

Then you were like, well, what's the next step in the process? And maybe that will help the project move forward a little bit. It's that reflection in action where it's like, okay, I'm want to keep moving forward. How do I do that? Well, the next step of the process is this. And what if I do that? And then can I reflect? Well, did that help me make progress? And so that's kind of how I've always thought of.

the design process as a thing to fall back upon when nothing else is working. So I never thought of it as gospel. I thought of it as a very helpful guidepost in case you get lost in the wilderness.

Nik (17:51)
Okay, I like that view. I I've always looked at it, I guess, when I first learned about it, right? That it was this sort of, ⁓ process that we work through. And I think as a student, it makes sense, because you don't know what you're doing at all. You don't have any of these tools effectively. And so we got to do something. And I like what you're saying here, right? It's a guide of like, what should I do when I'm lost? Arguably, when we start, we're often basically lost.

and try to then figure things out. But I guess maybe as I matured, I definitely started looking at things and I had instructors who said, no, these are really more like tools in your toolbox. And actually we're gonna keep giving you more and more tools and eventually you're gonna figure out how to put these tools together. I mean, I remember when I was doing my thesis work, a lot of my thinking really shifted when I was like, I learned so much about

people and I do so much need finding when I put something in front of them as a probe. And this is actually within HCI. We talk about design probes and technology probes. We'll link to these articles. These are pretty classic texts, but sort of these ideas of like these are some ways they're not even like prototypes. They're just sort of like the inklings, the beginnings of something of a new technology, of a new interface, of a new interaction that we put in front of something. And then we start to learn. And actually we can often learn the needs.

really well when someone is confronted with something.

Dan (19:13)
in, classic design, they're provocations. This idea of provoking responses based on a thing. How does this make you feel? What, what does this bring up for you? Those kinds of things. And you can do this for all different kinds of things, including very political things as well, as the name suggests.

Nik (19:30)
I almost feel like in a way, maybe some of these ideas maybe I feel like we've talked about within academia for some time, they've been around and around. It's like, in some ways, it's almost like this is getting out there. And because of the tooling now, because you can create so quickly, you can think about much more the use of provocations.

The other thing too is I wonder if, and this may be a little bit because of where Jenny is working and where anyone who's developing new AI products is, no one really knows what good design looks like here. So everything's a provocation. So it feels really easy to go out and say, well, here's a new idea. Here's something that's out there.

Dan (20:09)
I also wanted to talk a little bit about another topic that we talked about last week, which was will taste save design. And Jenny talks a little bit about that designers may be holding onto this taste a little too tightly because things aren't good now, but again, there's always that like, well, is taste going to get better? But

The one thing that I did like is that she said that, Hey, there's always going to need to be judgment. And that's judgment around like what should be built, what should be added, what should be made,

Nik (20:44)
That actually brings us really well into our second article from Nicole of designers, we should be killing it right now because Nicole actually brings up this idea of, okay, everyone's talking about how, taste is really what sets designers apart. But actually in the article, there's kind of a takedown of the idea of, of taste, right? Arguing that it's sort of a vague concept, right? That it's something that

you kind of feel it's subjective and...

The article actually makes a good case for the fact that the fact that taste as an idea is vague is maybe not that good for designers to be leaning on in an organization. Actually, the three things that Nicole suggests around sort of grabbing the attention of executives, arguably of helping to define same vision for the product to help drive that is really that

Dan (21:27)
Right.

Nik (21:39)
Do need to have connection? So do you get the problem? Authority, do you know your stuff? Like, do you know what you're doing? And then vision, do you know where this is going and can you present that? And it's sort of like, that's really what you need to have. And I actually think that those are things that designers can be great at.

Dan (21:56)
Right. mean, she says, and I kind of agree with her here, that craft is the baseline. We, don't want anyone to stumble on things because it looks bad or works terribly. But it is those other things. It's the authority. it's the vision. It's the storytelling that really gets us there.

to be able to work with other people and ensure that it's made in the best way possible. That's what Jenny is talking about when she talks about 30 % of her time now is working with the engineer to make sure that whatever is being put out there is being made in the best way possible.

Now, where I started to question this is the idea that this design mindset is unique. And some of the things she says about the uniqueness is that it's human centered and it's curious. And I'm like, well, I think that

A lot of our colleagues actually do have some of those characteristics. don't think that they are unique to design per se. So I'd be wary of hanging my hat onto those things as well because it does make it feel like

Design is a special snowflake and that's where I kind of get the ick a little bit. But I do believe there are things like she says, like design is optimistic and inclusive. I think that is, that is a really important point, bringing diverse perspectives together

My friend Uday often says that design is where all the existential problems of the product come to roost. And I think that is one thing that the designer can definitely do is help to craft the product from all these different angles. I think that is something that

design is really good at

Nik (23:57)
But Dan, you know, this idea though that design is where all of the concerns, all the perspectives come together. You know, one element of maybe what makes designers unique in their thinking is this ability to wrangle and wrestle and stay within the ambiguity, like to stay within the trouble. Like as a designer, I don't mind that, right? In other positions, like that ambiguity is bad. Like ambiguity is not good.

for a business, it's not good for engineering, right? But for a designer, I mean, ultimately our role is to eventually to reduce ambiguity, to form clarity, but that we're willing to sit with it and we're willing to work with it and we're not gonna get all upset about it. And I think that that's maybe something that does set apart a designer's mindset as opposed to some of the other mindsets within product.

Dan (24:46)
Right. I think there is this core concept in design that there is not a solution to a problem. There's multiple different solutions to a problem and that the problem that you may be addressing is not the problem that you think it is. I think those are design superpowers that I agree that you have to have some kind of ambiguity and be able to shift your mindset a lot.

as a designer. And I think that is where a lot of the power of vision comes in, where it's like, well, we not presenting the future. It is a future that we could be driving towards. I think that that is a place that design can bring a really particular kind of value.

Nik (25:33)
Yeah, Dan, you're making me think actually ⁓ there's a book by Norman Belgedes called Horizons, which is really about the designer and presenting vision. Now, Belgedes presents the vision of sort of the future of cities and autos, cars, and a lot of that actually became real. We do sort of have that. Some would argue maybe that the vision has turned out not to be so great, but at the time, right, it was

It was hugely influential and was hugely powerful. But actually in this book, and I'll say this book's like out of print. Like I have a version that's like some awful, terribly typeset copy on cheap paper that I bought online somewhere. But actually this is something that I read a long time ago that really set off my thinking about like what it meant as a designer to have a broader, grander vision of something.

This is why I think when Jenny's talking about sitting down with engineers, you need to be able to sit down and convey that vision. You need to be able to get everyone on board. And that is a place where I think really great designers can operate, but also really great product managers, really great anyone within your company. Anyone who can do that, think that's a skill, I think, to cultivate today.

Dan (26:42)
It's funny cause Jenny talks about North stars previously being years out and now for her and her team, they're like three to six months out there. They're much closer in. Now I will say that is that is her team in a fast moving industry in, you know, at a, a, at a fast moving tech company. I know that I definitely.

been working with some companies lately that there's no way I could give them a three month North star or a six month North star. It's going to take them years to get anywhere near the kind of speed and growth and rapid development that Anthropic is, at even, even if they, even if like the entire company suddenly adopted AI in just a crazy way,

It just, it's not that kind of company. this also makes me think of, there's a book that's all about companies trying to manage creativity. It's called Managing the Design Factory.

Again, this is probably a 20 year old book at least. And it is about like how companies really want to make things risk free and predictable and design like other creative practices doesn't necessarily work that way. Design systems were a way to try to codify that and make things more predictable, make things

easier and faster to generate. in general, like, yeah, there's a lot that can go into creativity that is not necessarily fast or easy to predict. I remember John Cleese once saying something like, if you want a more creative solution, you need to spend more time with the problem.

Maybe it was Steve Jobs that said that. I forget, somebody important said that. But I think it was like this idea of being able to marinate and think about things on longer time periods and more unpredictable time periods that sometimes produces really amazing work that this kind of quick crank out.

process doesn't really lend itself to.

Nik (29:01)
Well, but it's possible though that the quick process where you're being really provocative and experimental basically lets you start to see the shape of the problem better.

Dan (29:10)
Right, it might

Nik (29:11)
Yeah. So thinking though of accelerating processes, this is not an easy time by any means for I think designers and how we maybe need to change, how the shape of our field is changing.

And actually this week there was a really cool article from Martin.

Wright, who's a designer that works on complex digital services and products, including things like government, healthcare, private sector, charity. And they basically wrote up their thoughts on how they're dealing with the pressure to adopt AI as a designer. And I thought that this article was super cogent and just, I really liked a lot of the thoughts here. You some of the highlights was, off the front, like you control how much AI

enters your work, like you are in control of your process and you can basically decide that. And so you need to be thinking about, right? Well, okay, what do I try? What do I not try? And I'm in control, right? And I think that's maybe something where, I mean, unless you work in an organization that's forcing you to use this, in the end, right, you control your process, you set how you work, and you need to figure out what works best for you.

The other thing too that I really liked here was the second point of wait six months. And I thought this was super, I thought this was great advice because there's so much happening. There's so many new tools. There's so many new, just like new stories, articles, this model, that model, this new system. And the reality is, is that it is actually hard to figure out what's hype, what's real.

what's gonna work for you, what's not. And this idea that waiting and just seeing what sticks around can actually be really good if you don't need to be a first mover on any of this stuff or that you don't wanna be a first mover, you're not excited about the experimentation. If you're just excited about doing great work, see what's working for people. Let the crowd figure this out.

Dan (31:04)
And can you do some kind of MVP of an AI tool or something as a small part of your process? Can you, can you pick and choose where in your process that you want to start incorporating these tools or these ways of working into it? And I think that's totally fine.

he gives the example of Claude Code in here where he heard about it six months ago and it's stuck around. And so finally he's like, okay, well maybe it's time to start, start really paying attention to this. I just had this, this past week where we've been teaching students MCP, which we've talked about a couple of times on this podcast. And I read an article yesterday or two days ago that was like, MCP is dead.

It's old and I'm like wait a minute. This is like the newest thing like I we're just teaching this now Who knows if it's really dead or not. I'm I'm pretty skeptical of that but But yeah, if the wait six month rule we wouldn't have even bothered starting to think about MCP, although I guess it did come out last summer So and since it has stuck around. Yeah, it's probably time to start thinking about that

But I also like what he talks about here in terms of like the work, like putting the work at the center of your thinking. the whole point of all of this, to get back to one of your original points is that the design matters, the work matters. People want things that are well designed. it's not about the AI hype cycle.

It's not about what's getting funded and stuff like that, which is why we try to avoid Talking about that stuff here, but it is, what is actually going to improve the work and saying as he does in the article, everybody's using it. That's not a good design argument. Speed is not necessarily an improvement. And so if you're centered on the work,

And I would also say centered on the users and people who are going to be using your work, that's a good place to be and to think about how these tools start to get put into your process.

Nik (33:18)
Yeah, I really agree with that point. I think that, that's also where Martin talks about where you also have a lot of control within this, right? You control what the work is, all the inputs to the systems, right? These aren't automated yet. You're still orchestrating a lot of this.

I think that the thing I'm really taking away from this is sort of elements of like, how do you take back control? Because right now, maybe it feels like the narrative is like, AI is coming, it's taking over, you have to do this. And the reality is like, no, no. You choose what you do. You can do this in a principled way. You should probably experiment. And I think, when we flip it that way, that shouldn't be that.

new or novel to designers. We're always experimenting with things, I think. So why is this any different than anything? mean, arguably every other tool that ever came out when we moved from sketching to digital prototyping tools to maybe then some no code stuff. I mean, everything changes the way we do it. And then the end of the day, it's still a bunch of us thinking about what's the problem? What actually matters? What do we really want to create? And then going and making it and figuring out the best way to make it.

so that we create something that's wonderful at the end.

Dan (34:29)
I think there's a couple answers to that though. I think a lot of people are turned off by the hype. I think a lot of people are turned off by some of the people running these companies. And frankly, I agree. I think that a lot of people are like, well, this is built on stolen materials. So there's some ethical issues for people with it being built on other people's work.

And I say this as an author whose books were used to build a lot of these LLMs. so I think that there's a lot of people who are instantly like in the, turns me off kind of mindset. And I also think that there are people who are like, yeah, the process really matters to them. Like the process is really important.

And if you start getting rid of the process, then they're like, well, is this, is this even design? Are we going back to doing, the stuff where it's just like, just throw stuff out there and see if it works. And I think nobody wants, no one really wants to go back to that.

There are a lot of things that people are fighting against here when it comes to adopting these tools

I think that there is a lot of just pushback on it where people just don't like it.

Nik (35:50)
think those are fair points. mean, I think there's things that people should probably think about. I don't know. I I would argue maybe I don't think as deeply when I use these things. That being said, I'm a little bit in the mindset of like, well, I have to try these things out and understand what's going on. But that's maybe my position as sort of a design researcher and understand how things change.

Dan (36:10)
Well, and

you've bought into the hype, right? I mean, it's like, well, this is the cool new thing. that sounds uncharitable, but I definitely put myself in this category as well, because I've spent my entire career, building things on top of new technology. And because I find it interesting to see what can happen with it. And we work at an HCI department and that's.

kind of our whole job is researching, finding new ways to use this technology and making sure that human beings are still part of the equation.

Nik (36:45)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's actually a super good point. And you're right, I think we, we here and maybe for our listeners, like we are definitely on the general, like we're excited about this stuff. We're talking about it. We're learning about it. But yeah, there's all kinds of ways to look at this.

Dan (37:00)
I would definitely not put myself or I don't think you in the accelerationist camp where it's well, we should be doing everything we can to remove all the guardrails for this stuff and, just move forward with it and that everything that's happening is amazing and the problems will work themselves out. I'm definitely not in that camp.

one more thing I just wanted to say about this is that what I think Martin really gets at here and I love his vulnerability and practical tips in this article is just that anxiety that's out there. I feel it all the time. I get asked about it all the time. How do you stay up to how do you stay up on top of this? And I really think that that is a

real problem for a lot of people. And I hope that this podcast is a help to that and not a just one more thing to have to keep up with. But it reminds me of that Harvard business review article that we talked about a couple of weeks ago that was like AI is not making work more efficient. It's making it much more intense.

And I think that's a thing that everybody is feeling no matter what industry you're working in. That's why articles like this one are so important. And the support that Martin is really giving here to other designers, I think is really important too. We're all in this together.

We're all figuring this out together and I hope that we all muddle through on this and I wish us all the best of luck going forward and we'll see you in six months.

Nik (38:40)
It's really cool to see people's stories about how they're wrestling with this. I know myself, right? Actually going back to Wes McKinney's article about he was talking about how he's like, oh, I have to like stay up more. I have to get up earlier to work because of my agents need me. And I feel that actually one of the biggest

challenges I've felt right now is all of a sudden I can build and I've built more in the last year than I built probably in the last four years when I started this position here. And that was amazingly empowering. But now I'm almost shifting into this like, wait a minute, but I could be building

I could be making something. I could be putting something out there, but I'm not because I'm like fried. I need to sleep or I just need a break. But I'm like, but these things could just work. And I could, if I could just tell them more. And that's actually been a struggle that I've been having. And I'm trying to figure out what it means. arguably what it probably means is I need to sit down and probably think more and curate what is it that really needs to be built that I do want to then.

sink that time and be willing to stay up late for.

Dan (39:43)
you're at the point where you are your own personal, design studio or your own personal corporation. And now you have to do some judgment to bring it back to the Jenny Wen interview as to what you should be building and what is really important to get out there. yeah, but you have to do that with your own personal life, not just with a product that a corporation owns.

Nik (40:08)
And with that...

That's our show for the week, folks. Thanks for joining us. Next week, we'll be back with some more stories. We look forward to having you.