Training Taste, AI Systems Thinking, LLM Counter Defaults, and special guest Dan Maccarone

<p>Everyone in design is yelling the same two words right now: taste and judgment. But how do you get them? David Hoang's "Training Design Senses" does, and this episode starts there: how to train the eye, design dexterity, fluency of aesthetics, and rhetoric, with a detour into what copying from masters means when the copying happens through an AI. Then Christine Zhu on systems thinking for agentic products, which asks PMs to stop shipping features and start gardening: decompose for agent experience, define contracts between the parts, build feedback loops that capture correction signals. Our last bit of news is LLM Counter-Defaults from Nadia Piet and AIxDESIGN, a slider-based tool that exposes the settings your LLM shipped with and writes the instructions to override them.<br /></p><p>Our guest is Dan Maccarone, founder and CEO of Charming Robot, who spent a year rebuilding his studio's entire design process around AI after a project went sideways. He walks us through the experience brief (a PRD with a friendlier name), the whiteboard/review/approved branch structure, and what he calls high-speed mediocrity. He also explains why the prototype's 300,000 lines of code are never shipping anywhere, why documentation matters more now rather than less, and why his team still starts with sketching so they're building from their imagination instead of Claude's.</p><p><br />LINKS</p><p>"Training design senses"<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses" target="_blank">https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/training-design-senses</a><br /></p><p>”what systems thinking looks like for PM'ing AI products”<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&amp;utm_medium=web" target="_blank">https://open.substack.com/pub/christinezhu/p/grow-systems-build-features?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&amp;utm_medium=web</a><br /></p><p>LLM Counter-Defaults by Nadia Piet / AIxDESIGN<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/" target="_blank">https://counterdefaults.aixdesign.co/</a><br /></p><p>Thinking in Systems book<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o" target="_blank">https://amzn.to/4wuNA6o</a><br /></p><p>How Buildings Learn book<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V" target="_blank">https://amzn.to/4g2Y99V</a><br /></p><p>"Never mind the prompts, here's the thinking"<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f" target="_blank">https://uxdesign.cc/never-mind-the-prompts-heres-the-thinking-f4af4b92155f</a><br /></p><p>Charming Robot<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://charmingrobot.com" target="_blank">https://charmingrobot.com</a><br /></p><p>Story in a Bottle podcast<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/" target="_blank">https://storyinabottle.charmingrobot.com/</a><br /></p><p>The Barstool MBA (Audible)<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q" target="_blank">https://amzn.to/4pGRZ3q</a><br /></p><p>Fool's Gold, NYC<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/" target="_blank">https://www.foolsgoldnyc.com/</a><br /></p><p>MHCI Capstone sponsorship<br /><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone" target="_blank">https://hcii.cmu.edu/academics/mhci/capstone</a></p>