My Journey in UX, Design Systems, & Life

I had done everything right. Or at least, everything the current playbook says to do. Used AI to fill the gaps, reviewed it myself, then handed it off to more AI.

After years of building, maintaining, and supporting in-house design systems with real tokens, governance, versioning, support, and contribution models, I recently found myself building with Tailwind and shadcn. Thanks, AI!

In software, a dependency is a risk you accept. It's a package you didn't write, maintained by someone you've never met, that can break your entire application if it disappears. Good engineering means knowing which dependencies are worth the risk and which ones aren't. Right now, I'm watching our industry decide that people aren't worth…

I came across a Medium post titled "AI Will Replace 70% of Design System Work." The premise is that most design system work, documentation, component building, token management, accessibility audits, is "structurally automatable," and that the real value lies in governance. The author argues that teams need to move "upward from execution to orchestration" or…

I've been tinkering with something lately that I think more design system teams should pay attention to. I'm trying to teach AI how my design system works through Claude skills and Cursor rules.

I came across a post by Cassidy Williams a few weeks ago about LLM discoverability. The gist: she asked ChatGPT some tech discovery questions, noticed it didn't recommend her, then asked why. The AI gave her a list of things to fix. She fixed them. It worked.

Satya Nadella said AI would fuel a "creative revolution." GitHub told us Copilot would let developers "focus on creative and strategic work." Sam Altman measures ChatGPT's success by the percentage of human work it can accomplish. So why am I spending more time reviewing and fixing AI output than I ever imagined?

The UX developer role has always been hard to explain to everyday folks. “So you design stuff?” Not exactly. “So you code stuff?” Sort of. For years, people who sit between design and engineering have fought for a seat at a table that wasn’t really built for them. Then AI showed up and flipped the…

I keep seeing the same conversation play out online. AI is going to replace designers. AI is going to replace developers. AI is going to make everything faster and cheaper, and we should all be terrified or thrilled depending on who you follow on LinkedIn.

Some shows stay with you long after the lights come up. The Zac Brown Band at Sphere was one of them.