Constraints and intellectual work

I keep quoting him, but here’s another Cal Newport podcast that I can’t stop thinking about: Why do better tools make me worse at my job?. To save you a long listen: when you think about the theory of constraints, the bottlenecks facing personal or professional productivity are rarely solved by AI or other slick tool. When I think of my work in the UX world, producing polished content and final UI is never really my constraint. And it is precisely those things that AI is automating. Although even that requires a massive caveat, as there are still huge quality issues and fitting slop into a coherent larger whole. Even so, the real hard work of design is down on a white board—thinking through complex problems, figuring out what the real problem actually is, and matching the solution to that problem to the language and expectations of the audience. I don’t see automation solving that. And that is hard work that takes time and energy. I know this sounds incredibly snobby, but I suspect…