We confront the uncomfortable reality that design debt is now as crippling as technical debt, a point Arin Bhowmick makes by showing how legacy decisions silently shape user belief in AI products. While Eoghan McCabe argues that vertical models offer durable differentiation, we also wrestle with the community's growing tension over unpaid design challenges and the high financial cost of AI token usage. This episode isn't just about new tools; it's a necessary reckoning on why bad design still ships and how we must stop being output factories to survive the shift.
