The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.
Underrated life advice: Have more hobbies and fewer opinions. Learn an instrument. Plant a garden. Build something with your hands. Cook. Paint. Run. The happiest people I know spend less time debating life and more time actually living it.
South India crossing $4,000 GDP per capita in FY27 is more significant than it looks.
Historically, this is the zone where economies start shifting from a survival economy to an aspiration economy: More discretionary spending, stronger middle-class consumption, formalization, credit adoption, premium housing, travel, entertainment.
Interesting decade ahead!
While I may not fully agree with this outcome, I do think Gokul is not far off from where things might be heading. Most enterprises are not as design-pilled as we'd like them to be. Vast majority of enterprise software UX sucks and people use them anyway because their IT team approved it and everyone else uses it. Enterprises are majorly engineering or sales driven and designers here already operate under short deadlines and make the best out of putting design system puzzle pieces together on Figma to "make the software work". Great designers have generally been the ones who excel in these environments.
The trifecta of eng-pm-ux works in unison when they can all keep up with each other's pace of progress. What's happening right now is that the lines of code generated per day is exponentially increasing this pushes both UX and PM to keep up with this pace.
Sadly, many enterprises will lean into this and expect everyone to be able generate designs using AI to keep up. While the outputs maybe mediocre, it will get the product shipped much faster to meet commitments.
An early in career designer or PM role would just morph into an "a builder" who is expected to design, code and ship to continue to be valuable in this new age. A lot of them will also find more satisfaction and outsized outcomes in going down the founder path.
We may also see entirely newer design roles like AI-experience design who get to work on crafting sensory inputs and emotional responses humans have when interacting with AI. Talking to your open claw is when most people would have first experienced something like this, something that's designed to be very human like though its AI, something that better adapts to human affordances and stands out.
DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY
I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis.
Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant.
Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today.
If you're a designer, I think you have two choices:
1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business.
2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder.
Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.
feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed
(also the internet; there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents)
Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline.
Screen time dropped 49% (314 to 161 min/day).
The PM playbook was built on an assumption that the technology underneath your product is roughly stable
With the current pace of model progress, this is no longer true. Here's how we've evolved the PM role: