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

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

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

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.

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

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 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 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