Jesse James Garrett

Just how much of your role could truly be automated away? How much of your knowledge would you have to instill in an AI for it to really do some part of your job?

Veteran product leader Christian Crumlish’s exploration of these questions has turned into his full-blown AI project Piper Morgan, as he shared with me and Peter Merholz on our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. “I think of it as like a product apprentice who wants to be hired as an associate,” Christian says. “They’re trying to do a good job, and as they learn to do things that get more sophisticated, maybe they can eventually become more senior.”

Early on, the promise felt real. “It did a good job of analyzing the doc or critiquing the issue or making a new issue. So it proved, but in this very canned way, that such things are possible.” But then something shifted. “Like most things that are vibe coded, it got very spaghetti-ish. It was mixing the different projects. It wasn’t really that clear on what was what.”

That realization brought on its own pangs of guilt. “I started to feel the shame, the chagrin of a late career practitioner who’s doing everything the wrong way,” Christian says. “Like, you’re just building it? You haven’t done any research, you haven’t talked to any users, you haven’t done any design yet. You know, you’re just like YOLOing off a cliff.”

But while Piper Morgan may never be robust enough to be a commercial product, Christian realized there was an emergent side benefit to his challenges wrangling code out of a robot. “Along the way I think I started figuring out some things about how to work, methodology stuff that’s starting to maybe be potentially more valuable than any product that I could make,” he says.

For design leaders wrestling with whether to engage with this technology at all, Christian offers a pragmatic perspective. “Don’t just think of it as a thing you want to remain pure from. Think of it as an imminent thing. It’s not blockchain, you know, it’s more like mobile or the web, something like this is here to stay. Hopefully something better if people like us have more of a say in how it evolves.”

Check out the whole episode at the link right here. Thanks to Christian and Peter for the conversation!