Did “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” predict the evolution of software development? I think we, in our own wonderful tech bubble are living through what Douglas Adams described decades ago.

He wrote that there are three stages of every galactic civilization - the Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication phases, or How, Why and Where. He went on to characterize each phase with a question: “How can we eat?”, “Why do we eat?” and “Where shall we have lunch?”

And that progression can be quite an apt comparison to the history of software development.

Indeed, we started in the How phase of programming in the middle of the last century and stayed there for quite a while asking “How do we code this?”. Sometimes just for the sake of it! Programming languages had risen and then fallen into obscurity, engineering paradigms vied for dominance, trying to answer that question. It was a wild ride and some of us were quite lucky to be there for at least a part of it all!

Slowly but surely conventions settled and even though many frameworks continued to battle for relevance (and many still do), the Survival phase was giving way to the Inquiry phase. Companies and solo entrepreneurs started asking themselves “Why do we code this?”, spending a lot of resources on the discovery phase of projects, doing research on product-market fit and looking for unique selling points - the works! As the stakes got higher and development costlier, we started asking questions instead of building stuff for the sake of it.

Now after the rise of generative AI and more importantly - agentic AI we slammed shut the door to that decades long era. In just a couple of years we stormed into the Sophistication or “Where” phase of our progress! We no longer ask “Why implement this?” - we just do it and see what happens. With the ease of getting an app prototype done in minutes and refined in mere hours, we started asking “Where shall we find the audience for this?”.

But when launching a product is so easy (at least for someone proficient enough), this would surely mean SaaS is in a competitive bloody red ocean. Add the mass layoffs on top of that, and many engineers and designers now have the time and incentive to build something on their own - all of them stuck with the “Where” question…

Do they target a very small and specific niche solving its exact problem? Do they rely on personal flair and count on others to relate? Do they go local and put the product literally in the hands of businesses in their town? Or do they just shoot for the moon and hope to beat the big dogs?

So what is your answer to the “Where” question?

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For any designer adding the final layer of UI polish, of small details that give even the mundane accounting app a touch of personality, were for many years the dessert or the cup of coffee after a hearty meal.

After all the research, testing and data-driven decisions, we get to have that little stage on which we express our creativity…

If we could get to it at all. Too often product roadmaps drag us out of this and throw us right onto the next set of new features, before we could get to our dessert.

It’s been different in the past year or two however.

AI agents make adding visual fluff like micro-animations, delightful flourishes and fancy effect shaders easy and often even do them as a free bonus on top, without you even requesting them!

And they often look amazing, right?!

So amazing in fact, that we sometimes fail to see that one broken style guide convention, an odd process flow or a font use that’s not on brand. Turns out we now get a very finished looking UI that wows us but hides foundational design flaws and unintended (and that’s the important bit!) design inconsistencies - the stuff that makes the product feel wrong, rather than look wrong.

And this is actually a common pattern I have observed over the years while training novice designers. They often do the same (well… who am I kidding, we, experienced designers sometimes fall for that too!) - high on the rush of inspiration they start adding finishing touches to an interface thats still needs foundational work.

So it’s nothing new?

Au contraire!! The big difference is, this process used to take hours - time during which we ourselves or someone in the team could actually stop us, pull us back, get us on the right track. Now it’s “Here’s your finished UI!”, 47 seconds after you requested the design…

So an extra layer of maturity on our end is required now and a bit more intent when we prompt - explicitly stating the stage we are at and the fidelity of the work we expect to see generated. Just so we don’t get blinded by a flashy decorations layer.

In an odd turn of events, AI agents - those chaos-wrangling probability-crunching machines, require us to be more methodical and work in a more structured way! Or in other words - they make us eat our greens and in return, they eat our dessert for us. And I for one find this deeply ironic.

But let me know: Do you find yourself blinded by the extra layer of polish on top of unfinished interfaces or have you already built the resistance and you are seeing “through the matrix”?

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Vibe coding is truly giving product managers an embarrassment of riches… but is that a good thing?

Throughout our entire careers as product designers and engineers launching a new feature has been an event! It was a reason to celebrate (or hold our breath) as we see users interacting with it.

And there was a reason for that - teams had been working weeks or months to plan, design, implement and test that feature. It was their baby, which they would now see walk for the first time…

For product managers and upper leadership though it has always been a race. “We need to ship A, so we can move to B and then C!”

And now, finally thanks to AI agents, they can zip through the whole planned features list in a just few weeks, launching all those features the teams never had the time to get to. And some do just that. A 6000 line PR? No problem!

But what happens when the user loads the app in the morning? They feel like seeing a new app - elements have moved around to make room for new panels and actions, processes have changed… and that’s probably the third time this happened over the last month!

That’s a cognitive disaster from UX perspective!

So a long list of new features no longer equates to competitive advantage. The actual decision point has moved to how to pace it and where the real value for the client is.

All of this, of course, varies widely on the maturity of the product and the intended market. Some products require a gradual warmup to change while others may not be as affected by experiments and volatility.

And this is exactly where a good product person really shines and calm decisions matter the most.

Notice that I am not even commenting on how well those features are implemented in terms of UX and how much technical debt they may have incurred to the backend. I will talk about that in a separate post soon!

But for now: do you find this embarrassment of riches a good thing, bad, just different? Let me know!

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