Be like water, The death of the empty state, AI for UX

"You have likely seen companies quickly introduce AI mandates to keep pace with these trends. In the blink of an eye, we went from having no money for a Mural license to heavily investing in a bulk subscription to Copilot. Vanity metrics, such as the number of tokens used (tokenmaxxing) have been used to measure implementation speed, without a direct link to how they will affect OKRs or, for UX, how they can deliver consistent results for our users."

"The pattern with AI coding agents is strikingly similar. If you don't have automated tests, or documentation, or CI/CD pipelines that support progressive delivery, you won't succeed with microservices - and you won't succeed with AI coding agents either. The organizations reporting the best results are the ones that already invested in the foundations."

"The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back."

"Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child's drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up"

Companies have rapidly introduced AI mandates and shifted from limited tooling budgets to large subscriptions. Implementation speed has often been tracked with vanity metrics such as token usage, without clear connections to OKRs or consistent UX outcomes for users. AI coding agents face similar constraints: without automated tests, documentation, and CI/CD pipelines that enable progressive delivery, microservices and AI agents fail. Organizations achieving better results already invested in foundational engineering practices. Online spaces also show strain from machine-generated text, creating ambient grief and guilt about losing familiar places. AI-generated content can flood communities and resemble low-effort crayon-like output, harming the quality of shared work.

Read at Medium