★ THIRTY TWO NORTH PRESENTS ★
a playable guide for designers
working in the age of the machine
Not the big studios. Not the 200k follower crowd. Not us. Anyone posting a finished AI workflow is selling a course.
Your job was never making screens. It was making decisions that survive contact with reality, and defending them to someone who disagrees.
The machine is very good at the first part. Nowhere near the second.
Eight short levels from here. Half of them have nothing to do with AI. Blow the dust off the cartridge and keep going.
Any% is reaching the flag by any route that works. 100% is touching every coin on the way. Picking the wrong one is still the most reliable way to lose a week.
Exploration. Ten options you will bin. Naming things. Untangling a brief.
Wrong is cheap. Glitches allowed.
Anything a developer builds from, a client sees, or the shared library touches.
Wrong is expensive and compounds quietly.
AI is extraordinarily good at work that looks finished. So was every cabinet in the arcade: from the attract screen, all of them looked like a full game.
Ask what a mistake costs. "I redo it before lunch" is a speedrun. "A developer builds it and a customer finds it in November" is a 100% run, whether you feel like one or not.
Say which one out loud before you start.
The mushroom painted like the good one, right up to the frame where it takes a life.
SLOWER WITH AI TOOLS
16 experienced developers · 246 real tasks
afterwards they still believed they were 20% faster
They were slower and could not feel it. Worse where they had the most experience, in the biggest systems. Which is exactly our job.
Your gut is a broken speedometer. Once a month, time one real task. Next month run a comparable one the other way. Two numbers on the board beat any amount of "it felt quicker".
Fifteen screens generated is not progress. One screen a developer built without three questions is.
The ones worth a quarter. This week, on whatever is already on your screen.
Thirty comments at once? Do not start fixing. Paste the lot, ask for three buckets: build now, decide later, blocked on someone.
Before you design, make it interview you. "Ask me the ten questions a senior designer would ask. Design nothing yet."
"Where does this fall down at 10,000 rows, on a small screen, for a read-only user, in German?"
Empty, loading, error, first run, offline, permission denied. Missing states is the top reason a wireframe bounces.
Renaming layers, mock data, writing the ticket. If it feels like data entry, stop doing it by hand.
The Long Read. Pull decisions, actions and open questions out of the 60 minute call, always with who said it. Then spot check three against the source.
The Translator. Same decision, three audiences. Most design work fails at explaining, not designing.
Keep your own file of five prompts you actually reuse. Most people retype the same instruction from memory forty times, slightly worse each time.
Four ghosts, one maze, four patterns. Nobody beat that maze on reflexes. They beat it by learning who chases and who cuts you off.
Confident tone, clean structure, invented detail. Tell: suspiciously tidy, never says "I am not sure". Counter: spot check three specifics.
A lovely card style that is not in your library. Counter: not in the library means a request, not a decision.
The brief is silent, so you guess plausibly. Eight weeks later the client had a very specific answer. Counter: a missing answer is a question with an owner.
Five changes in one message. It does three and silently breaks a page. Counter: one change, verify, next.
Six months of accepting the first plausible option, until your own opinions go soft. Slowest enemy in the game, the only one that takes something nobody can give back.
The counter is the next level.
None of this is about AI. It was true on a beige tower with a floppy in the slot and it is true on your machine today. Change one thing, change something from here.
One screen a day, ten minutes. Three sentences: what is it for, what did they make hardest, what would you do instead. A year of that and you will know in seconds why a layout is not working.
Two lines with every real decision: what else was on the table, why it went back in the box. Answers "why did you do it this way" before anyone types it.
"Proceeding on the basis that X. Needs Y to confirm. Flag by Friday if wrong." Fifteen seconds turns a silent risk into a tracked one.
Blocked and loud is fine. Blocked and quiet is expensive, because three things get built on the wrong assumption first.
Three days of silence costs more than one awkward question. It always did. The window just looks different now.
The dinosaur only shows up when the connection drops. The real work is what you do while it is running.
One place for the truth. If you cannot say in one sentence where the current truth for a screen lives, that is the bug.
Systems before screens. An hour on a shared component pays back across every screen. An hour on a one-off pays back once.
Sit with a developer for an hour a month. Watch them build one of your screens. You will learn what makes your work expensive.
Most of what slows you down is social, not technical. Not asking. Not saying the estimate is wrong. Not admitting you did not follow the call.
No tool fixes that. One awkward sentence, said early, fixes all of it.
There is a level in the old palace game where the floor is a mirror. Drop through and the other you copies every move. Same sword. Same reach. Same bad timing.
You cannot out-fight it. Every hit you land, it lands back. People spent hours trying.
The only way through is to stop swinging and walk straight into it. The game calls it a boss fight. It is not.
It is the work you keep pretending is the real job.
Most of the resistance is not the tool. It is you defending tasks that were never the point. Nobody hired you to push pixels into alignment. If a machine takes that, you get the afternoon back. The question is what you do with it.
"AM I GOING TO BE REPLACED?"
HP 100 / 100
CHOOSE A RESPONSE · TAP ONE
Honestly: some of it goes. Turning a settled decision into a tidy screen is getting cheaper fast.
But you do not win by out-typing the machine. You climb one level, from the person who executes to the person who decides.
And you are not behind. Use three things from this page properly and you are ahead of the industry you actually work in.
A conscious exception, written down, is completely fine. We ship those every week.
Silence is not.
★ THANK YOU FOR READING ★
WRITTEN BY THIRTY TWO NORTH
SPECIAL THANKS ARCADE MAZES · PALACE MIRRORS · INSTANT MESSENGERS · SOCIAL SCRAPBOOKS
A CYBER CAFE IN 2004 · AND THE OFFLINE DINOSAUR
NOW GO MAKE SOMETHING
SOMEBODY HAS TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT