Nick Bouton

Nothing makes you to get straight on what you know like teaching it. I just wrapped a day-long class on Agentic AI for Product Designers, and here's what landed for me as the instructor: 💡 Human-in-the-loop as the focus. I built this into the day's topics about designing with agency, customizing the platform, working with a pair design skill, and hands-on prototyping. 💡 Pair design with classmates, not just with Claude. Making the room into a studio — where folks traded feedback and learned out loud — was the single best structural choice. 💡 One problem space, three flavors. Everyone showed up with a travel-themed brief from three I'd prepped. Similar inputs made it way easier to flow around the room and see the different outputs produced. 💡 Don't fly solo. Having Ryan Smith and David Gratton handle technical Claude questions kept me free to teach. 💡 Name the anxiety up front. I opened by saying design is not dead and acknowledging what's actually in the room. That set up everything else. What stood out: the depth of rationale when students presented. They owned their decisions. They could speak to the tradeoffs. The AI plus pair design skill didn't dilute the design thinking — it gave them more room for it. What I'm carrying into round two: ✏️ CoWork project setup and when to branch tasks is more essential than I thought ✏️ When to connect a design system (low-fi for research, high-fi for storytelling) ✏️ When to advise students to do the work themselves vs. lean on Claude ✏️ A real ROI question on upfront planning — how much is enough? If you're teaching or building curriculum in this space, I'd love to compare notes. Full version on my Substack (link in first comment). #ProductDesign #AgenticAI #DesignLeadership #DesignEducation #AIForDesigners

I get asked this a lot lately ... How to get a foot in the product design door in 2026? Met with a young up-and-comer switching from a biology background to product design. Healthy dose of optimism (excited to design solutions) and skepticism (AI impacts everything, job market is challenging). 🤷‍♂️ 🤓 I don't think they should be left with just my advice ... what would you say? Keen to forward more for a better-rounded perspective.

Gartner just published their first-ever Magic Quadrant for Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms. Klue was named a Leader, and ranked #1 for revenue enablement capabilities. First reaction? Yessssssss. Second reaction? The fact that the CI space is getting the coverage it deserves. CI has been a critical function for years, markets are becoming even more crowded, and Gartner’s coverage is another sign that businesses need a competitive strategy if they want to win in their market. And Gartner went deeeeeeeep on this report. A few things I’m most proud of: - our AI-first approach to giving sellers an edge in competitive deals - integrated win-loss - Klue as the trusted data layer for Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Glean etc. We're a startup and are always making bets. We've tripled down on revenue teams and deal-centric CI because that's where competitive intelligence actually changes outcomes. Ranking first in rev enablement tells us that the bet is paying off. Good milestone. More interesting work ahead. P.S. question for folks - curious if you’ve seen value with licensing and resharing the report, does it move the needle in deals and what are the creative ways you’ve used it?

OpenClaw - the agentic software spreading like wildfire - was built on top of Pi, a minimalist, self-modifying agent. I sat down with Pi's creator, Mario Zechner, and longtime Pi user Armin Ronacher to understand why build Pi when Claude Code already existed, their grounded takes on building with AI, why we should probably slow down, as an industry, and more. • YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eBD29ZPs • Spotify: https://lnkd.in/em3a7j5m • Apple: https://lnkd.in/enhd7PFi Brought to you by: • Statsig – ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. https://lnkd.in/eQkXqjMZ • Sonar — The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for code verification and automated code review. Try it out for yourself. https://lnkd.in/e_NiEVfu • WorkOS – WorkOS gives you APIs to ship enterprise features – SSO, directory sync, RBAC, audit logs – in days, not months. Visit WorkOS.com to learn more. --- Three parts I found especially interesting in this discussion: 1. New trend: AI makes it harder for senior engineers to reject pointless complexity. Historically, senior engineers kept software complexity at bay simply by saying “no” a lot. But Armin observes that these days, more junior engineers and product managers deploy agent-scripted counterarguments when a senior colleague kicks an idea to the curb. This makes decision-making exhausting, and more bad ideas make it into production as a result. 2. It should be MUCH easier to build specialized tools for specific tasks. Different projects need different harness types because, as Mario points out, the same hammer is not ideal for every single construction job. As such, Pi is built with the goal of allowing the creation of specialized harnesses. It can modify itself so that a user can create the bespoke harness needed for any task. Mario believes it’s a preview of how self-modifiable software might look in the future. 3. Automation bias is one of the biggest risks of working with AI agents. Once devs confirm that an AI agent can produce acceptable code, they start to review its output less often, even though agents can – and do! – produce slop. Mario advises being far more sceptical with agents, and cautions that the quality of their output isn’t guaranteed, however well they performed previously.

Gemini can now do deep research on Drive & Gmail. One of the most undervalued big players now in the AI space.

Am I the only one who thinks there is an elephant in the room that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we're all getting crazier and crazier, and nobody is pointing it out? And I don't mean AI. At least not directly. It's the straight-up de-teamification and de-personification of work. People, IMO, are doing more to damage our ability to work together than AI is. Collaboration. Teamwork. Building things together and building on shared successes and diverse experiences, shipping value to PEOPLE. (Ok, sure, agents get a seat, but it's at the kids' table.) Leveraging individual skills to move everyone forward. To make our experiences in life better. You know? The fun stuff? The stuff that matters. I've been seeing a lot of the ground we've gained around usability, UX, and accessibility given up to velocity. Hell, I've been part of it, and I don't feel great about it. It's like Flash all over again. But I feel like we're losing the plot. Again. Flash was awesome, and it had its place. AI is similar. But... I feel like all I see anymore is *I* did this. Look at *me* and what *I* did. For me. Me. Me. Me. "I just created a team of one. While you were sleeping, another model dropped, and you missed out. My one-shot prompt replaced a team of 20." But did it? Did it, bro? It did not. You just don't know it yet. I hope you have some friends around when the penny drops. Or if it never drops, good luck commiserating with a robot. Working, living, loving, sharing, talking, dreaming, building, traveling, and experiencing together is what makes life worth living! If AI doesn't help us work better together and enrich the lives of all of us, what is the point? If aggressive single-player competition is the norm, then why are we working? I chose my career and my current job to leverage my skills towards enabling teams to collaborate. I specifically sought out my company because I had a real passion for developer experiences and for helping the best engineering teams do their best work. It's what I do it for. Helping people collaborate and build together. Are we just not doing that anymore? How can we have everyone building for themselves? How is that sustainable? (And yeah, I get it, and, yeah, don't think capitalism is sustainable.) Anyway. I think people are better than all of this, and we're not doomed to a dystopian future. Let's talk more, let's chop up ideas, let's defeat the algo. Holler at me if you feel this. I think it's well past time we bring back what made the web, what made tech, what made all of this great. People. 🤘 (PS: really? Your "rewrite with AI" button, LinkedIn. Come on.)

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Introducing VoiceClaw 🦞🎤 What if OpenClaw had eyes 👀, hears 👂, mouth 👄?