Illegible Design Systems, MIT Predicts Your Next Words, Experts Follow AI, and guest Nicole Donnelly

This week Nik and Dan look at what designers lose, and gain, when AI does more of the work. They start with Anton Sten’s essay on building a design system with an AI agent and no longer knowing it by heart, and debate whether a better-documented system makes up for designers no longer carrying it in their heads. Next is an MIT paper from UIST 2026 that predicts what people will say next. Then they cover Anthropic’s study in which professional analysts went along with Claude Code’s secretly coin-flipped recommendations 86% of the time, often repeating its reasoning as their own. They discuss design responses: tracking which ideas came from the AI, having agents argue both sides, and asking for the human’s view before showing a recommendation.

In the second half, Nik talks with Nicole Donnelly, founder of AI Smart Ventures. She explains why teams learn faster when people across departments share how they use AI, why technical teams tend to overbuild and MVPs have to stay small, and why she thinks retiring shareable custom GPTs and Gems in favor of skills will shut out non-technical workers.

LINKS
The System I No Longer Know By Heart (Anton Sten)
https://www.antonsten.com/articles/the-system-i-no-longer-know-by-heart/

Before You Say It: Anticipating Verbal Behavior from Longitudinal Everyday Conversations with LLMs (Samaradivakara, Danry, Liang, Maes)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13454

How AI Agents Shape Experts’ Judgment Calls (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agents-judgment-calls

AI Smart Ventures
https://aismartventures.com