Nik and Dan discuss Impeccable: a set of skills for AI agents to improve the "AI House Style" designs that AIs are churning out. Then, talking about a new research paper that suggests AI's greatest potential is as entertainment and cultural production. Lastly, we review Dan's article that categorizes four possible futures for AI, including AI disappearing into existing apps, specialized AI features, AI as an operating system, and AI as a universal intermediary.

On this week's episode, Nik and Dan discussed:

• Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout, a new feature that lets US shoppers complete purchases directly inside Copilot without ever leaving the chat window.
  
• Google's A2UI, an open-source specification that allows AI agents to generate user interfaces on the fly.
  
• And straight from CES, a holographic AI desk companion from Razer.
  

Plus: our AI and Design Predictions for 2026.

Dan and Nik discuss the rumor of Google's AI Studio getting a design mode, Anthropic and DeepMind CEOs at Davos talking about the future of AI, Anthropic's Constitution for Claude, and the concept of software too cheap to meter.

Nik and Dan dive deep into Figma MCP and the need for a dual strategy for experience design, that considers both human and AI website visitors. Of course Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw came up. Some research on creativity, and finally the role of user researchers in the AI world.

Dan and Nik chat about OpenAI's new Frontier platform and what it might mean for designers and even their career paths. We then discuss James Harrison's essay "The Return of The Intuitive Designer." Then Dan interviews Shane Johnson, Principal User Researcher at Figma, on the role that user research has in this AI world.

Dan and Nik delve into the Figma's 2026 State of the Designer Report, people feeling like AI is being shoved at them, the challenges related to AI's impact on flow and attention, and the Harvard Business Report's implications of AI on job satisfaction and work intensification.

Nik and Dan talk about another announcement from Figma and Anthropic and the impact on the future of design tools. They examine a new research paper from Apple and the HCII on how to best design computer use agents, and talk about Wes McKinney's article The Mythical Agent-Month. They end with discussing the role of taste in an AI world and if it is the skill designers should be focusing on.

Dan and Nik delve into the evolving role of designers in the age of AI, emphasizing the need for adaptability, control of your own process, and how vision and judgement are design's superpowers. This episode explores the impact of AI on the design process, the importance of maintaining focus on the work, and the challenges of keeping up with the rapid pace of change in the industry.

There was just too many interesting stories this week, so Nik and Dan do a Very Special Hot Takes episode with a wide-ranging conversation that covers 14 topics, including the importance of product sense, open source tools, the cultivation of design judgment, the urgency of AI regulation, the future of AI images, the impact of AI on design jobs, real-time UI, writing specs for AI agents, and breaking the echo chamber in interfaces.

Chapters

• 01:05 AI Brain Fry
• 02:47 The Importance of Product Sense
• 05:40 Collaborative Editing in AI-Generated Images
• 07:52 The Model is The Machine
• 12:06 User Experience and Proprietary Data in AI Products
• 16:06 Sacred Values in AI
• 19:50 OpenPencil
• 22:46 Training Design Judgment
• 26:57 The Critical Need for AI Regulation
• 30:01 The Future of AI Image Generation
• 31:50 Sorting Designers
• 35:38 Real-Time UI
• 41:58 Writing Effective Specs for AI Agents
• 45:28 Breaking the Echo Chamber in Interfaces

Nik and Dan talk about new AI image editing tools from Canva and Adobe and the value of baking AI right into existing tools. The conversation switches to a provocative new essay by George Sivulka on the importance of Institutional AI and not just Individual AI, which can be chaotic if it's not coordinated.

https://x.com/gsivulka/status/2031797989908627849

Lastly, Dan interviews Louise Macfadyn, author of the upcoming book Designing AI Interfaces.

https://amzn.to/4lAf9qi

Dan and Nik offer opinions on Google Stitch, a new design tool that just dropped from Google Labs. They also dig deep into John Maeda's 2026 Design in Tech report, debating his key insights for designers in the evolving landscape of AI and design. Lastly, a discussion on the codification, sharing and future of downloadable design skills.

Google Stitch: https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
Design in Tech 2026: https://designintech.report/
MC Dean's Skills: https://substack.com/@marieclairedean/p-190232071 and https://substack.com/@marieclairedean/p-190956350

Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's latest announcement about computer use and its impact on how designers design screens. Then they discuss the article "AI didn't kill product intuition. It exposed who never had it." Author Chris Noessel stops by to talk about his new book Designing Assistant Technology and the challenges and considerations in designing AI to assist users. The conversation touches on the risks of descaling and over-reliance, and cthe importance of keeping cognitive engagement in AI design.

https://amzn.to/414zOta
https://www.productparty.us/p/ai-didnt-kill-product-intuition-it

Dan, Nik, and special guest Mike Kuniavsky ("Observing the User Experience") do a deep dive into the impact of AI on the traditional design practice and process. They get into the disappearing/evolving role of design artifacts, the influence of AI on design literacy, and the reevaluation of the design process in the age of AI. AI has triggered the democratization of design tools, a shift in organizational power dynamics, and ofttimes the complete disregard for of unknown unknowns. They also explore the changing product risk surface, the redefinition of scale in design practice, and the role of synthetic users in user-centered design.

LINKS:

Mike's article "Design practice assumes a world that no longer exists: what’s next?" https://medium.com/@mikekuniavsky/design-practice-assumes-a-world-that-no-longer-exists-whats-next-ca3f588ad4d8

Other recent articles on Design Process:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-process-isnt-dead/

https://medium.com/@kristian.bjornhaug/the-design-process-isnt-dead-but-ai-is-changing-where-design-happens-220dce1b3acd

https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-new-design-process-2-6-2b5967507263

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-process-isnt-dead-its-only-thing-save-us-rick-starbuck-7pbmc/

“Cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/

Dan checks out a Fast Company interview with Anthropic's Head of Design Joel Lewenstein and finds reasons for hope. Dmitry Kargaev points out the flaws of AI UX and has some reasons for why is happens. A catalog of AI brand archetypes, and Dan applauds Patrizia Bertini's call to rethink Human-Centered Design to be less about "users" and more about "citizens."

Links:

Fast Company Interview with Joel Lewenstein

https://www.fastcompany.com/91519289/inside-anthropics-biggest-design-choices

AI Products Have Terrible UX: Here's Why

https://hackernoon.com/ai-products-have-terrible-ux-heres-why

Aesthetics of AI

https://www.acolorbright.com/en/insights/aesthetics-of-ai

Human-Centred Design has grown up. It’s time we did too

https://uxdesign.cc/human-centred-design-has-grown-up-it-is-time-we-did-too-766601c1fc7d

We're All Doing The Same Job Now

https://odannyboy.medium.com/were-all-doing-the-same-job-now-81924e0c80d6

The Existential Designer

https://odannyboy.medium.com/the-existential-designer-facilitating-meaning-through-interaction-8952c358ec52

Surprise surprise, Dan and Nik talk about Anthropic's launch of Claude Design. The Nik does a set of rapid-fire interviews from the 2026 CHI conference, featuring the latest HCI research in AI and Design.

Google's MC Dean, the author of over 100 AI skills for designers on everything from accessibility to moods, joins Nik and Dan to talk about Skills: how to make them, how to use them, and what the future of them could be.

LINKS

MC Dean on Substack
https://marieclairedean.substack.com/

MC Dean on Github
https://github.com/owl-listener

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman book
https://amzn.to/4sYGQek

Dan and Nik talk about how to design for your next user being an agent, the impact of AI on team structure and dynamics, the challenge of memory and recall in conversation-based AI systems, and the shift towards AI experience design focused on constraints, not prompts.

Chapters

• 00:00 Your Next User is an Agent
• 12:23 Rethinking the Shape of Design Teams in AI World
• 17:03 The Impact of AI Efficiency on Team Interactions
• 24:39 The Forgotten Conversation Problem in AI
• 31:14 The End of Prompting: AI Experience Design with Constraints

LINKS
Your product has a new user. It’s not human.
https://www.elenaverna.com/p/your-product-has-a-new-user-its-not

Rethinking the shape of design teams in an AI world
https://uxdesign.cc/rethinking-the-shape-of-design-teams-in-an-ai-world-82f986bf9a27

The “Bug-Free” Workforce: How AI Efficiency Is Subtly Disrupting The Interactions That Build Strong Teams

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/bug-free-workforce-ai-disrupting-teams/

The forgotten conversation problem in AI chat

https://uxdesign.cc/the-forgotten-conversation-problem-in-ai-chat-4d3d0c3ea525

The End of Prompting: Why the Future of AI Experience Design Is Constraint-First

https://uxmag.com/articles/the-end-of-prompting-why-the-future-of-ai-experience-design-is-constraint-first

Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back.

Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality.

Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager.

LINKS

Thinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

Cognitive Surrender
https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/

Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished
https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53

claude code is not making your product better
https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product

Obviously Awesome (book)
https://amzn.to/433nIkR

When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in.

We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box.

Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap.

LINKS
UI for AI
https://uiforai.design

The Thinking Was Never Just Mine
https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837

Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up.

https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2

Introducing Claude for Small Business

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business

Operator
https://fin.ai/operator

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/

Show Notes:

• The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma Blog
• State of AI in Design
• Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/

Updates to Figma and Google Stitch
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/

The Design System Advantage is Memory
https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory

Fraude Design
https://fraude.design/

Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
https://www.quilter.ai/

Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch rather than after. Rounding out the news: Amazon's Proteus warehouse robots can now take natural-language direction from human workers, and a Salesforce designer shares how her team is mastering AI tools through peer-to-peer learning, a dynamic that gives Dan flashbacks to the early days of the web.

Then Nik sits down with Mark Boyes-Smith, Head of AI Design at Miro, for a deep look at how one of the world's largest collaboration platforms is integrating AI at every layer. Mark walks through Miro's new Sidekicks and Flows features, including voice interaction and custom connectors, and talks candidly about how his distributed design team rapid-prototypes in code, branches and remixes ideas, and builds conviction before shipping. He also shares his thinking on designing for long-running agentic tasks, the coming challenge of multi-agent orchestration on an infinite canvas, and what resilience and "product taste" mean for designers navigating an era of relentless change.

LINKS
Microsoft Copilot 365 Redesign
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/

What “done” means when you’re shipping AI features
https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/

Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot

https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/

Designing how designers master AI

https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945

New Miro Features at Canvas26

https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9

A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" play might just work. Dan and Nik dig into what Apple actually shipped, why App Intents matter for designers, and the gut-punch reality that your year-old iPhone won't run it.

Also this episode: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is building a design-led AI lab, and nobody can quite figure out what it's selling. Sarah Gibbons maps the four design jobs AI has created so far. And Perplexity's research with Harvard Business School claims agents can cut task time by up to 92% — with enough caveats to fill a show.

LINKS
Secret AI Lab News
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-plans-to-start-a-new-ai-company

The Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-jobs-ai-created/

Perplexity/HBS Research
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07489

Thinking Machines Demo Video
https://youtu.be/A12AVongNN4?si=ODvSCf9IKTzwBiiU