IIIMPACT Design

An AWS exec said something recently that stuck with me:

"Organizations that are moving faster and maturing do something different. They begin with a business outcome and work backwards, building an agentic system that reduces decision handoffs, increases learning, and removes friction, all while maintaining quality. AI maturity comes from applying AI to the system*, not to the individual."

Meta was awarding devs that used as many tokens as possible, which they just recently removed this poor incentive structure.

Here's what we're seeing on the ground:

Organizations are generating more AI slop, more bugs, and more tech and design debt, faster than ever. Their QA teams can't keep up with the output, so now "the devs do QA." They've turned people loose with AI in the name of speed, with no governance underneath it.

That's the exact opposite of working backwards from an outcome. It's a recipe for disaster.

Our team has been working relentlessly with organizations to do the counterintuitive thing: slow down to speed up. Break down internal processes. Build the AI harnesses and governance that keep UX and product strategy from becoming an afterthought, or a one-shot prompt in your AI tool of choice.

"But I can one-shot a design that's close enough."

So can your competitors.

The edge isn't speed. It's discipline. It's building data-driven agents with feedback loops, pulling from customer service data, user behavior, analytics, that give your prompting-happy PMs a more rigorous path to a better product.

Start with the outcome. Build the system. Everything else is just slop at scale.

Software engineers are slowly losing the ability to navigate their own codebases.

When developers write code natively, they build a mental model of the architecture. They know where things are, how systems interact, and why certain fragile decisions were made years ago.

When developers transition to simply prompting an AI to generate code, that mental model degrades.

They are outsourcing the implementation, which means they are outsourcing their understanding of the system.The problem surfaces when something breaks. A developer who hasn't written the code no longer knows how to fix it natively.

They are forced to continue prompting their way out of the problem, guessing at solutions because they no longer possess the deep, structural knowledge of how everything is wired together.

We are trading deep expertise for temporary speed.