The UX Collective's latest piece makes a blunt claim: in the AI era, functional software is table stakes, not a differentiator.
The argument is that 'working' has become a commodity. Any team with API access can ship something that functions. The new competitive variable is design, not as aesthetics, but as the mechanism that determines whether a product gets adopted, retained, and trusted over its alternatives.
The piece is worth reading in full for how it frames the designer's role not as a polish layer applied after engineering, but as the primary driver of product outcomes in a market where technical parity is the default starting point.
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