Claude just wants a human

You likely heard the chatter about “the mexican standoff” - engineers, product and design roles collapsing, and each thinking they can do the others’ job with AI. There’s some truth to that, with a little help from Claude, engineers are doing a lot of the work that product managers were doing previously. And the other way round.

For UX (research, design, strategy, information architecture), and I think for every role, I think that means we should let go of our LEGOs. I mean, our (so beloved) processes, artefacts, diagrams, and to some degree our identity as a Designer or UX Researcher and so on (all capitalized). Time to let go.

Roles are collapsing because ALL the disciplines have been constructed around the fact that code was expensive. It took a long time to write code for anything, you’d need a team with standups and stuff, it could take weeks or months to get things built. Product management structured its discipline, its tricks of the trade, its deliverables around that, and so did UX, because it made sense for 20 years.

And now code is cheap, and so the Design Process (caps) is dead? (Jenny Wen from Anthropic).

Largely yes.

I keep thinking of it as layers: all the superficial layers of the design process (Design Thinking!) are mostly dead in forward-looking orgs. (Code is not cheap in banks yet, or in most larger organizations, so the processes survive there, for a while.)

UX skills are valuable though. Mix your more fundamental UX skills (understanding humans, interaction design, looking at the data, interviewing users, structuring content) with a deep understanding of the new AI stack, and you will be golden in the next few years. The best way to do right now that is getting hands-on with Claude.

So we get rid of the layers of cruft. And focus back on the fundamentals. Which was always the fun part. Then add some AI skills in there - this is all new, nobody has them, you might as well be one of the first people to get good at evals, for example.

These are some crazy times, but you’ll be ok.

Health and happiness,
Peter
PS: I teach this stuff at https://modelcontextexperience.com - working on a set of new things coming soon.