Latest / The Feed & The Thread / The Feed & The Thread - May 28, 2026

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The Feed & The Thread - May 28, 2026 · The Feed & The Thread

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  One CEO replaced their design team with a Product Analyst and
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  AI. That sounds like a dangerous shortcut. But the real issue
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  isn't the tool. It's the fundamental misunderstanding of
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  what design actually does. We need to talk about that gap.
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  Welcome to The Feed and The Thread, brought to you by
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  Chicago Camps. Leadership By Design is on Thursday and
• 0:22
  Friday, September 17 and 18 and tickets are available now! And
• 0:25
  while you're at it, get caught up on UX fundamentals with five
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  minute UX at five em UX dot com. The Feed & The Thread is
• 0:31
  available online at feed and thread dot com to submit your
• 0:34
  feeds, or download our app for all the feeds and threads
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  delivered right to your pocket.
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  We keep treating AI as a magic fix for design problems. But the
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  real work isn't in the tool. It's in the messy human stuff we
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  tend to skip. That tension runs through today's Feed. At UX
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  Design.cc, Marcelo Ordenes argues in "We haven't lost the
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  battle for Empathy. Have we?," that empathy isn't dead — we
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  just stopped doing the hard part. AI gives us speed, but it
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  can't replace the discomfort of stepping back from the
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  interface, sitting with human complexity, and actually
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  understanding the people we design for. That's a discipline,
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  not a soft skill, and we risk shipping shallow solutions every
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  time we skip it. Beth-Ann Sher at Intercom argues in "The
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  ultimate guide to knowledge management for your Service
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  Agent," that knowledge management is the unsung hero of
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  AI service. Leaders are pouring money into models while ignoring
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  the data that feeds them, but an AI agent is only as good as the
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  documentation behind it — structured, accurate, and
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  current. The win isn't in the algorithm; it's in the library.
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  Francesco Castronuovo at Codrops walks through a no-code-meets-
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  animation build in "Building a Scroll-Driven 3D Cube Gallery in
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  Webflow with GSAP," pairing Webflow CMS for dynamic content
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  with GSAP for the heavy lifting. The cube rotates in sync with
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  the user's scroll, turning a flat gallery into something that
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  feels three-dimensional. It's a working proof that immersive
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  experiences don't require coding everything from scratch, and
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  that scalability doesn't have to be the trade-off. Other reads
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  today from CSS-Tricks on text reveals and UX Design.cc on book
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  covers.
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  The community keeps circling the same uncomfortable truth today —
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  AI didn't break design teams, it just made the cracks visible.
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  Over on r/UXDesign, a senior designer shares a story about
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  being replaced not by artificial intelligence, but by a product
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  analyst role — and the real issue wasn't the tool, it was
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  leadership treating design as just making screens. One
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  commenter nailed it, noting that AI didn't cause the failure but
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  exposed pre-existing organizational dysfunction
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  faster. The real gap is between organizations that value visual
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  deliverables and ones that value structural decision-making, and
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  that's the gap AI is widening, not creating. In r/UI_Design,
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  someone asks whether dark mode screenshots feel too
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  intimidating for a health app — a classic aesthetic-versus-
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  approachability clash where the designer wants premium and
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  simple, but the use case needs safe and open. Dark mode reads
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  as heavy or clinical, and that runs against everything wellness
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  UX is trying to communicate. The question is really about whose
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  state wins — the designer's taste, or the user-state the
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  product needs to meet — and in wellness, it's almost always the
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  user-state. Back on r/UXDesign, two threads land on the same
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  point from opposite sides — one veteran refuses AI tools
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  entirely on ethical and creative grounds, while another company
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  forced heavy AI adoption then yanked the token budget when
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  costs got real. Designers there went from vibe-prototyping back
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  to static files in weeks, and the whiplash is the real
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  problem, not the tools themselves. When AI gets
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  mandated without strategy workflows break, and when it
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  gets cut without ramp-down progress halts — both are
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  leadership failures dressed up as technology problems. Also on
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  r/UXDesign, a designer in Vietnam resigned after their
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  company merged design into product management entirely,
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  forcing designers to ship code they couldn't debug. It's the
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  vibe-coding trend running aground on what specialized
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  expertise actually does — quality, debugging, and
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  accountability all live in different heads for a reason.
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  Calling that consolidation efficiency is just a label
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  change; what it actually is, is negligence dressed as cost-
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  saving. The pattern across today's threads isn't AI as a
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  threat — it's organizations using AI as cover for cutting
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  the competence that actually ships the work.
• 4:28
  Chicago Camps is hosting Leadership By Design on Thursday
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  & Friday, September 17 & 18. It's an online event, so you can
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  join from anywhere in the world! Tickets are free, thanks to the
• 4:37
  generosity of the community! If it's within your budget, you can
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  purchase a general admission ticket for only twenty six
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  dollars - with limited early bird tickets at only fifteen
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  dollars. Get tickets now at Chicago Camps dot org.
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  That story about the designer in Vietnam being forced to debug
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  code they didn't write is the perfect counterpoint to the
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  knowledge management piece. We're seeing a collision between
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  speed and structure. Leaders want the output of a senior
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  designer but the budget of a prompt engineer. It feels like
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  negligence. You can't compress design thinking, visual
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  execution, and maintenance into one role without breaking the
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  product. The real issue isn't that AI is fast. It's that
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  organizations are lazy. They treat documentation as an
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  afterthought. Beth-Ann Sher's argument holds up here. An AI
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  agent is only as good as its documentation. If you don't have
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  structured content, the tool fails. The Vietnam case is just
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  an extreme example of ignoring that data layer. You're skipping
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  the library to save money on the librarian. But here's where I
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  diverge. The problem isn't just missing docs. It's that we
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  haven't valued the act of structuring knowledge enough to
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  protect it. When you merge design into product management,
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  you lose the discipline of empathy. Marcelo Ordenes points
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  out that empathy is a discipline, not a soft skill.
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  Exactly. Empathy requires sitting with human complexity.
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  AI gives you speed, but it strips away the discomfort of
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  understanding people. If you remove the specialist, you
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  remove the mechanism for that discomfort. You get a smooth
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  surface with no depth. So the fix isn't to defend the job
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  title. It's to defend the output of that discipline. We need to
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  make structured knowledge a deliverable that can't be
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  ignored. If the system can't explain its decisions, it's not
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  a system. It's just a wish. The gap between speed and structure
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  is widening. And the teams that bridge it won't do it with
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  better tools. They'll do it by refusing to skip the messy work.
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  That's The Feed and The Thread for today. We'll catch you next
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  time!