“When I say understanding is the new bottleneck, what I mean is that I need to keep a clear understanding of what’s going on in my head to advance the project and be a full creative participant in that project.” "Coding agents make coding more lonely. Can we open up that process to make it inherently collaborative?" For EP7, “Software With Taste,” we welcome @geoffreylitt, design engineer at @NotionHQ, whose work explores malleable software and designing environments for thinking. AI speeds up our work, but is our understanding keeping up? Geoffrey explains the risks of optimizing for speed at the expense of human understanding, why he uses AI to quiz himself during code reviews, and how to develop taste and build tools that help us stay creative, think deeply, and work together. 0:00 - Introduction 0:47 - Design Is More Than Better Animation 3:32 - Malleable Software and Coding Agents 9:06 - Human-Software Interaction is a Full-Stack Problem 12:43 - Getting Users On Board and Deeper 15:53 - The Trap of Just Building More 20:27 - Primitive Design Is a Taste Problem 22:20 - Understanding Is the New Bottleneck 27:22 - How To Develop Taste? 34:49 - Productivity vs. Speed 38:10 - Will Better AI Hurt Human-Human Collaboration? 44:34 - Advice for Designing Better Products

EP7 of the AM Podcast drops tomorrow! Software engineering has never been faster. How do we avoid the risks of optimizing for speed at the expense of human understanding? We sat down with @geoffreylitt, a design engineer at @NotionHQ, to unpack taste, malleable software, and what it means to build for human understanding. Here’s a preview 👀

In EP6 we chatted with @ZhiruoW -- a PhD student at @CarnegieMellon University working on progressive adaptation of agents and human-agent collaboration! Zora's work builds agents that empower people to accomplish more! Preview below, full episode coming tomorrow!