Patrick Neeman's lead piece makes the sharpest argument in this issue: designing for AI in 2025 looks exactly like designing for the web in 1999. No settled patterns, no agreed vocabulary, tooling still being written as practitioners use it. The ground is soft. That is the condition, not a temporary inconvenience.
Three pieces demand attention beyond the headline links. Addy Osmani's 'The Orchestration Tax is You' names a specific cognitive trap: spawning more agents does not parallelize your attention, and the cost of forgetting that is architectural debt inside your own skull. Adi Leviim's piece on the permalink problem identifies something most AI users have already felt but not named: chat-based AI made conversation ephemeral by default, and nobody designed a fix. Arin Bhowmick lists 7 things vibe design cannot replicate, which is a more useful frame than the usual pro-versus-con takes on AI-assisted design.
The through-line across this issue is delegation: cognitive delegation to AI agents, design convention delegation to an industry still making it up, empathy delegation to tooling. Adrian Levy's piece arguing that users are now principals, not end-users, is the one to read if you only have ten minutes. The rest of this issue fills in why that shift has no clean design language yet.
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