I’m Head of Product at Phished. Previously CPO at SweepBright and co-founder of Mono.
It’s 2025 and I get onboarding emails and product newsletters from AI products with “5 prompts we like that you can use tomorrow”.
If there’s one thing that shows how broken AIUX is, it’s this. This is the equivalent of phones that shipped with manuals that were bigger than the phone. Someone should solve the business problem and build a proper UI for it. Big chance it’s not a conversational one.
Unfortunately, LLMs inherently lack the ability to be disobedient and choose unknown paths. And while I strongly believe we can get lots of “good enough” from LLM’s, I’ve always found the term “reasoning” a painful simplification of what we call reasoning in humans.
Genuine intelligence isn’t pattern-matching but the creation of new explanatory knowledge. A model that predicts the statistically “next likely token” by the very limits of the way the system works can’t hatch a bold conjecture, criticize it, and then rewrite its own worldview when the idea fails. That open-ended, error-correcting creativity, the freedom to be productively wrong and then improve, is the essence of human reasoning.
Until our machines can generate and test explanations rather than recycle correlations, they’ll stay (very impressive and useful) parrots rather than true thinkers.
The red and blue intro alone is worth watching at least the first episode.
When we build new breakthrough technologies, we often imagine a future where this technology takes over 100% of the world.
But we still light candles. We still drive on dirt roads and we still use spreadsheets.
Technological advancement is more often stacked on top of existing infrastructure rather than replacing old technologies.
AI is no different. It’s a massive paradigm shift. And at the same time it will know incredibly slow adoption over a longer than expected period of time. Some AI companies will win big time. But the world will still need SaaS, graphical interfaces, and spreadsheets.
The assignment was to create an interesting image with two elements: a vase and a hammer. I did what most people would do in that scenario and I drew an obvious image of a hammer nearly hitting the vase.
The assignment was part of the admission test we had to take in university when I wanted to start studying design. Afterwards I learned it had two goals:
I miserably failed the first goal but had successfully completed the second. Little did I know that my journey of getting over the blank canvas would just begin. The ensuing years were a relentless endurance marathon of getting over myself and increase creative output. Something people underestimate to this day when I talk with them about any creative effort.
All creative endeavours effectively begin with a violent crime. Unless you have the cojones to kill the perfect idea that exists in your head and start by putting something in the messy, real world, you will never get on a path to create anything worth existing.