Latest / The Feed & The Thread / The Feed & The Thread - March 2, 2026

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The Feed & The Thread - March 2, 2026 · The Feed & The Thread

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Today we're exploring why waiting for a perfect product
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might actually be a liability in the age of AI. And we'll hear
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how true UX maturity feels less like adding new skills and more
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like unlearning the assumptions we've held for years.
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Welcome to The Feed and The Thread, brought to you by
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Chicago Camps. Our next UX Camp event is coming up on Saturday,
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May 30th. Tickets are free - with an option to pay if it's in
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budget for you. There's an open call for speakers so now is your
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chance to get on stage and share your ideas! You can also find
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The Feed & The Thread online at feed and thread dot com to
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submit your feeds, or download our app for all the feeds and
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threads delivered right to your pocket.
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Today's Feed tackles a tension between perfection and speed,
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while asking what wisdom looks like when tools vanish. Waiting
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for a perfect product is now a liability because AI slashes the
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cost of course correction. Jeff Gothelf argues this in a piece
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called "AI rewards provisional decisions, not perfect ones,"
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where he suggests leaders make provisional commitments aligned
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with human goals. He notes that while enterprise constraints
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exist, AI coding agents allow teams to deploy fixes in
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minutes. That rewrites the assumption that we need
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certainty before shipping work. While toolsets have a shelf
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life, wisdom remains evergreen as designers age. Darren Yeo
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explores this in "The wisdom curve," at UX Design.cc, by
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profiling a seventy-year-old colleague who pivoted from
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woodcraft to EdTech. He urges professionals to move past ego-
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driven success toward Maslow's sixth level of self-
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transcendence. This shift means focusing on altruism and
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mentoring rather than just technical mastery. Small teams
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remain the most effective unit for product development, even as
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AI augments individual capabilities. The author argues
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this in "Small Teams Win, Again," at LukeW, citing how
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teams of under five people achieved significant results
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before AI existed. Larger teams often suffer from decision-
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making bottlenecks that AI doesn't solve. Instead, highly
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capable systems likely mean we need fewer people to build
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products quickly. Also publishing recently: Smashing
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Magazine, UX Planet, and Nielsen Norman Group.
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So let's see what's actually happening in the forums today.
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In r/UXResearch, a thread titled "The most uncomfortable insight
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I've had as a UX researcher," sparked a real look at messy
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reality. One user shared designing for a store card
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application where people apply on mobile while multitasking on
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a bus. They noted, "Twice in my career I've had to design for
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use in 'not ideal' conditions." That specific constraint of
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testing on a moving bus versus an offshore oil rig really
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highlights where real work happens. Wait-wait - which one
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of you did design for someone on an oil rig? That’s so cool!
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Over in r/UXDesign, the conversation around "UX maturity
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feels less like adding skills and more like unlearning
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assumptions," is hitting hard. People are realizing that growth
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isn't just about stacking new tools but stripping away old
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habits. It's a sharp reminder that sometimes you have to
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forget what you think you know to actually move forward.
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There's also a lively debate in r/Design asking "WTF is Taste?"
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while another thread in r/UXDesign argues that the work
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feels more like "decision-making under constraints" than pure
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design. One commenter put it bluntly, saying, "decision-
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making without constraints would be art." That divide between art
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and problem-solving is where the real tension lives for many
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practitioners. It sure does seem like we’re hitting the down
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swing on the mood pendulum in the community lately.
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Chicago Camps is hosting UX Camp Summer on Saturday, May 30th.
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There's an open call for speakers so submit your idea
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today! It's an online event, so you can join from anywhere in
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the world! Tickets are free, thanks to the generosity of the
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community! If it's within your budget, you can purchase a
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general admission ticket for only thirteen dollars and fifty
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cents. Get tickets now at Chicago Camps dot org.
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So here is the tension that kept nagging me today: we're told AI
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lets us ship imperfect work fast, but the community says
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design is really just decision- making under constraints. And
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that's exactly where the friction is. If you skip the
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messy foundational work to move fast, you're not making
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decisions, you're just guessing. But Jeff Gothelf argues that
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waiting for perfection is now a liability because AI fixes
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errors in minutes. That assumes the fix is the only thing that
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matters, but the community thread on taste suggests that
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judgment comes from years of exposure to those very mistakes.
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So if you automate the error correction, you remove the
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scaffolding where juniors actually learn to spot the bad
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habits in the first place. And that's the scary part. We're
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building a generation that can ship code instantly but lacks
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the wisdom to know if the solution is actually human-
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centered. It sounds like we're trading the long, hard work of
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building judgment for the short- term speed of provisional
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decisions. Exactly, and if you don't have the wisdom curve to
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guide those decisions, speed just means you're wrong faster.
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That's The Feed and The Thread for today. Keep designing with
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intention!