Liam Spradlin 🌻

I’ve gotta hand it to her, this is the most galaxy brain left punching I’ve ever seen.

What task have you automated with AI that has had the biggest impact on your daily life?

DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis. Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant. Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today. If you're a designer, I think you have two choices: 1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business. 2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder. Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.

Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded.

Is the genie that's out of the bottle in the room with us right now?