We need to make bad designs before we get to better ones

The future of design is agentic.

AI implementation today is to just slap an LLM on a product.

It feels a lot like a horseless carriage: before cars existed, people slapped an engine on a horse carriage. It was an iteration on what they knew. We realize it’s a terrible design after the fact.

But this is fine. We need to start somewhere.

Good designs start off as poor imitations of an existing solution. Think of when smartphones first came out. Websites were crammed into a tiny phone and they were almost unusable. Responsive design was the reaction to our new reality.

And we’re now being forced to respond to new AI realities every day.

This is why I’m so excited and bullish on agentic software. It’s the next step up from being constrained by precise inputs. I’m going to start talking more about the potential here.

In the meantime, get ready to add a new acronym to the designer title alphabet soup: AX (agent experience).

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P.S. I love this illustration from Linear so much that I wish I came up with it.

P.P.S. An excellent read on AI Horseless Carriages. Key quote: “It's not a lack of AI smarts that is keeping us from the future, it's app design.”