I'm incredibly excited to announce I've joined Nielsen Norman Group (@nngroupux.bsky.social) as a Senior Experience Specialist. I'll be helping shepherd curriculum and content for their new self-paced courses. This role sits at the intersection of my entire career and I couldn't be happier.

I have a huge personal announcement to share next week. I'll be joining an amazing organization in a fantastic role. Stay tuned!

AI can produce faster than humans can evaluate. That gulf is widening, and it's causing burnout, apathy, and missed errors at scale. This isn't a skill problem. It's a design problem. In my new write up, I'm calling it the evaluability gap.👇

Hot take: sometimes it better to do things yourself and not have the AI do it.

Productivity was never "output quantity". It still isn't, no matter what AI overhype says.

LLMs are burnout machines. Make sure you have personal guiderails in place to protect yourself. Your velocity does not need to match the endless token-generating probability engine.

“More features” was never the answer. Thus “more code” and “more merges” isn’t the answer either. Figuring out the right problem to solve for your users, and using AI assistance to implement it quickly with a performant, usable, and tested design…now that’s an answer.

A student pointed out a YouTube JS course that is a ripoff of my JS course. Not “teaches similar content” but a clear ripoff, sometimes word for word. Looks like the course is the foundation of their channel. This person now has 2 million followers. *sigh*

Saying "we use AI to rapidly implement feature requests" is another way of saying "we don't think hard about the features we build".

LLMs are definitely a great tool that allow us to ship software faster. Shipping good software full of good ideas...well, that's another matter entirely.

Developers are more productive, but more exhausted, than ever. Why? I'm calling this phenomenon "single-mode burnout." 🧠Read the full write up in my new blog post. 👇

Anyone else get to a place sometimes where you're waiting for AI so you feel like you should be doing something else, but if you do something else all the context switching will degrade your flow? There needs to be a name for this, like "vibe paralysis".

Having AI agents mimic Agile/Scrum ceremonies is like seeing the invention of the car and deciding the best thing to do is hitch your horse buggy to it.

It takes more skill, awareness, and self-control to build less software rather than more. Solving only the right problems, debt and security care, user research. All result in less software. In the age of AI it’s easy to build more. It takes skill to build less.

What if teams could comment and compare vibe coded interactive prototypes, and the comment stored the state of the prototype when the comment was made? Demo👇

Properly educating the next generation of developers is one of the biggest challenges for our industry today. Is your org teaching junior devs? What do you think is working? What isn’t?

I've seen multiple companies recently adopting a "teaching hospital" approach for their developers. New developers are "interns" (not juniors) and a developer educator (i.e. in-house mentor) is a position in the company. The industry needs *more* of this approach.

I'm pleased to present Trace, a markdown-based declarative modeling approach to spec writing for LLM consumption. It's designed both for experienced devs and to give new devs a focus on *what* to learn (thinking in systems) in the age of AI. Blog post and GitHub repo: 👇

I'm making my book Normal UI free to read online! The book is the result of decades of UX work and thousands of usability tests. It's a simple technique that any designer or developer can learn that improves the usability of software applications. 👇

What is the future of self-paced education in the age of AI? I've been experimenting with designing LLM-based learning experiences from the ground up, and wrote up my thinking on what I'm calling a Learning Surface.🌊

PMs who vibe code their PRDs into prototypes should be clear that it is an expression of "what" not "how". A communication tool. PM-generated prototypes should not become an excuse to skip the work of UX designers. That's a danger, and one mature teams do well to avoid.

Status: recording this week a series of lectures on Agent Skills. They will be added free to my AI-Assisted Dev course and also be released as a short standalone course on Udemy. If you aren’t writing and using Skills for your agent, you should be.

Saying code generation removes the need for software engineers is like saying self-driving cars remove the need for roads.

Don't create AI slop. Find the points in your creative process that LLMs can optimize. Keep your voice, your thoughts, your reasoning, your unique perspective. Give AI your boilerplate, your point-and-click, your drudgery, your tedium. Beat AI slop with efficient quality.

I'm a fan of Figma and FigJam and have courses on them. You can Figma for getting your design system together. But these days your team should be spending more time vibe coding throwaway interactive prototypes, getting real research data and iterating rather than pushing pixels.

I now have a course for this! www.pluralsight.com/courses/intr...

I'm so excited to announce a brand new course on @pluralsight.bsky.social, Introduction to MCP! This isn't a coding course, but a conceptual one, ensuring you understand what MCP actually is and how it works, so you can use it to your best advantage. 👇

New podcast episode just dropped! In the age of LLMs some devs are losing the joy of coding. How can you motivate yourself and your team while using LLM generation?

No release of any new LLM model will change the fact that you need to understand what you're doing as a developer.

Your dev team should be standardizing on Skills, not just for providing tooling to an AI, but to package domain knowledge. An artifact from the requirements process should be a Skill for the business the software is supporting, and it should be shared with the entire dev team.

I'm a unicorn. I do full-stack dev *and* deep UX / design / usability work. AI blurs the UX / dev line. Designers who learn some coding can supercharge their vibe coded prototypes. Devs who learn a bit of UX design can build better apps. Should you learn to be an AI unicorn?

I am quietly looking for a position in UX or DevRel/DevEx to add the value of my 25 years as a full-stack dev, bestselling dev educator, UX designer and researcher, and conference speaker. If you know of a good fit, feel free to DM me.

It's the last couple of days to get my new AI-assisted development course at early-access price. New modules are dropping soon and the course will be finished up in February. It's something different - a core mental model that we use to build good practices.

Remember that AI doesn’t feel the pain of past architectural choices. But you will.

You still need to know what you’re doing.

I see pushes lately to not even review code, just run tests and test behavior. I’m tempted to dismiss anyone pushing this as not a serious professional. Many devs code software where bugs and edge cases have real world impact. Where accountability is a thing.

"That changes everything" is the new "you're absolutely right".

You’ve never been a writer of code. You’re an implementer of intent.

1/6📖 I'm writing a book out in the open that you can read for free. It's on software development methodology for the AI age. Agile, Scrum, and others are falling short. AI has changed software dev, our processes need to change with it. 🧵

If you find yourself stuck in a conversation with someone that absolutely has to have the last word, let them have it and move on. They aren't truly listening anyway.

JavaScript frameworks are massive abstraction networks. They make things the web platform supports easier to do, but harder to reason about. If you understand how frameworks work, it makes the reasoning part easier.

Today is the last day ever to grab lifetime pricing as an All-Access founding member to my site. - Access all courses now + future - Lifetime yearly price as long as you subscribe - Discounted coaching sessions - Exclusive community/LinkedIn group - Live monthly round table 👇

Current status: I’m writing a book on my AI-aware software dev methodology to replace Agile/ Scrum. Most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. Book will be free to read online.

You all really slept on my Team Dynamics and Soft Skills course. Communication, managing devs, dealing with fellow team members, dealing with crisis and more. AI-proof skills to grow to senior, lead, and architect. Skills no tutorial teaches. It's on sale, and not expensive.👇

This, plus when it comes to web dev courses, it’s mostly about wiring up 15 frameworks and libraries that were just in that week. Deep understanding is rare to see. Seeing someone teaching it is even rarer.

Project-based courses are the root of tutorial hell. "Follow what I type" doesn't lead to understanding. You need an actual education. Deep conceptual understanding accompanied by coding yourself.

I'm excited to announce that I've added team licenses with bulk discounts to my under-the-hood course, Understanding React. Plus, if your team grabs bulk seats, you'll get a coupon for a discounted team coaching session too! 10+ seats this month get a free 60-minute session!

Udemy is getting bought by Coursera and the Udemy brand will disappear next year. I've been the "Udemy guy" for a decade, and met many of you there, and it is very sad to see it go. I hope the best for the new now expanded Coursera, and we'll see what happens next.

I've been a Design Engineer in the web dev space for 20 years. There just wasn't a name for it before. Before we just called it "dev guy who is also a UX guy".

I'm excited that the first DIU developer roundtable is scheduled for this Thursday! Roundtables will start with a tech talk, and this month's topic will be on communicating with non-technical stakeholders, clients, and managers. You can still join us as a founding member!👇