The five best design links, every weekday

Category: Career

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sunilpai.dev

The task isn’t the job

A new role, and some questions I want to build my way through.

adobe.design

Is design dead in the age of AI?

No, but it’s undergoing a revision. Written by Jessica Walsh.

uxdesign.cc

Rethinking design leadership with swarms and flocks

How structured emergence solves manager burnout, team bottlenecks, and systemic design debt.

blog.florianherrengt.com

AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

The economic shift that values human architectural judgment over execution speed.

noemamag.com

Why is everyone in tech so sad?

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless.

lethain.com

Middle management roles are also a trap

Most middle management roles make practicing executive skills difficult, and sometimes negatively select against developing them.

blog.senko.net

“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. And there's a gross insult to all programmers everywhere.

jarango.com

What’s the purpose of information architecture?

Fifty years after its formal introduction, the discipline of IA is still widely misunderstood. Here‘s a corrective.

hvpandya.com

The hierarchy of competence

Nine stages of how people operate at work, in strict order, where each one is measured by a job it removes from your manager.

microsoft.design

What happens when you can’t hide behind craft

In an era where AI has made execution nearly free, the designer’s true value no longer lies in craft alone but in having a genuine point of view.

zachholman.com

The cold email

Three of the biggest changes in my life all stemmed, in part, from cold outreach.

nngroup.com

No new name has replaced “UX”

A survey of 604 tech and design professionals found that “UX” remains the default name for our field, while alternative names remain fragmented.

survey.devographics.com

State of Devs 2026

Take the survey and help map all the aspects of a developer's life that are not code, especially as AI starts disrupting the very nature of our jobs.

philmorton.co

A side project is the fastest way to upskill in the age of AI

Don’t miss out on the learning you get from building a real thing.

doc.cc

Five to Nine: a photographic series

This series slips into the hours after the badge comes off—the unbranded life where designers become someone the job never meets.

addyosmani.com

Earning taste and judgment

Taste used to be a byproduct of the reps. Agents took the reps. So if you’re junior you now have to go get the taste and judgment on purpose.

itsnicethat.com

People will always need to trust the human behind any decision-making

When your manager is paying more attention to AI than your creative role, what can you do?

theatlantic.com

The people who will thrive in the AI age

What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.

stevekrouse.com

Learning to code is still worthwhile

Code is possibly the best medium to learn mathematics, and meta-skills for learning in general.

alecscollon.com

I think I have LLM burnout

I didn’t expect to get so tired of reading LLM output.