Swimming Against Hard Edges

I was recently invited to contribute to a course on "AI-enabled design workflows." I turned it down. Not because I'm not interested in AI and design - if you know me, you'll understand ;-) I turned it down because workflow doesn't seem to have a place in my work any more.

What We Called Workflow

For thirty years, I designed through staged handoffs. Research to wireframes to visual design to prototyping to development to testing. Each stage had its tools, its specialists, its deliverables. Each transition was a hard edge.

We built elaborate processes to manage these edges. Design systems to bridge Figma and code. Product requirements to translate business needs into engineering specifications. User stories to carry intent across disciplinary boundaries.

Even at Normally, where we deliberately built interdisciplinary hybrid teams and broke down silos wherever we could, the hard edges persisted. Hard edges in how we thought about the engineering stack. Hard edges around data schemas. Hard edges around tools and handovers.

All of this was referred to as "workflow," but that was generous. Flow suggests fluid movement from one state to another. What we actually had was a series of discrete transformations, each requiring translation, coordination, and waiting. Even doing our best to blur them, the edges were still there.

It was more like industrial plumbing than flowing water. Work moved through predetermined pipes, with joints and valves at every connection point. Efficient when it worked, but brittle. And every joint was a place where pressure could drop, where meaning could leak.

What Actually Flows

Now I talk to Claude Code. I describe what I want. We build it. Not describe it, or specify it, or plan it, or design it. We build it. Full stack. I see it rendered in the browser or on device. I notice something about the experience and describe how I want it to be different. We change it.

In any thirty-minute session, I might iterate on the pixel-level interface, the generative UI card picking, the model prompting, the data schema, and the multi-model sequencing. Not in sequence. Simultaneously.

The product experience doesn't just live in the interface layer - it lives throughout the entire stack. And I can touch any part of that stack and immediately see how it affects what the user experiences. I can change the experience by changing how the model is prompted, or which model is selected. By adjusting the data schema. By modifying the interface rendering. By reshaping the conversation between several AI models.

There are no hard edges between these layers any more. No handoffs. No translation. No waiting for someone else to implement my changes in their domain.

This isn't workflow. This is work itself - fluid, immediate, integrated.

A Position in Space

Workflow was a sequence in time - a thing you moved through, stage by stage, in order. What I have now is a position in space - a medium I'm suspended inside, that I can move through in any direction at once.

That single change, from time to space, is the whole thing. Once you've felt it, you can't go back to thinking about the work as a line.

Swimming Rather Than Piping

The old model, even with the best processes and the best culture, was about managing boundaries. Figma to code. Frontend to backend. Design to data. Each transition needed a coordination protocol.

What I do now feels like swimming. I'm immersed in the entire medium of the work. I can move in any direction - deeper into data structures, up to interface details, sideways into conversation design - and it's all the same continuous space.

The tools don't define the boundaries any more. The command line isn't just a development tool - it's become the design environment, the collaboration room, the prototyping space, the deployment platform. I design by describing, develop by conversing, test by rendering.

When you're swimming, you don't think about transitioning from stroke to stroke. The movement is continuous, responsive, adaptive. You're always in contact with the medium. You adjust to the current, the depth, the direction, in real time.

That's what this feels like. Continuous contact with the work itself. And I'm right in the middle of it - which is how I get to truly know it. I can feel what it's like to push in one direction and drift into another. Suspended in water, the material pushes back just enough for me to move myself within it and sense how it responds.

What We Are Gaining

The cognitive load has shifted completely. My ADHD brain stops being the one tracking dependencies, managing handoffs, coordinating between tools and teams. Instead it's freed up entirely for judgement, intention, iteration.

The feedback loops are immediate. I can test an idea as fast as I can articulate it, and every change teaches me something - about the system, about the experience, about my own intention.

And I'm designing the intelligence of the system, not just its surface. When I adjust how the AI interprets a user's need, or how it sequences its responses, or how it holds context across a conversation - that's interface design at the deepest level there is.

What We Might Be Losing

Iterating at the speed of thought, I can outrun my own reflection at times. The system becomes so responsive that I sometimes stop questioning my assumptions about what I'm building. I have to remember to come up for air and check where land is.

This isn't really about efficiency, or better tools. It's about the dissolution of professional categories that have structured creative work for decades. When there are no handoffs between design and development, what happens to those roles? When the feedback loop is real-time, how do you keep the reflective distance that good judgement needs? When you can reshape the experience at any layer of the stack, which skills actually matter?

So, How Do We Teach This?

Which brings me back to the course I turned down.

The doing, I think I could teach. Not by explaining it - you can't lecture someone into swimming. You get them in the water. You build something together, and somewhere in the building they stop reaching for the old handoffs and start moving in the medium. Immersion teaches itself. That part I'm not worried about. But the brief "AI-enabled design workflows" already locks us into the old model - and that brought me back into the world as it is for many working inside large organisations or institutions.

The difficulty is not in teaching people how to swim in and with the work - it is what happens when you climb out.

The swimming stays fluid only as long as you're in the water. The moment the work has to re-interface with the rest of the organisation - still siloed, still hierarchical, still stitching discrete pieces together and calling the seam "flow" - the hard edges come straight back. Not in the work. In everything around it. You can dissolve the boundaries inside your own practice in an afternoon. You cannot dissolve the boundaries inside an institution by describing them.

This cultural and organisational dissolution is going to happen. It's inevitable. It will simply arrive at different speeds in different places. And the places it arrives fastest won't be the ones with the best tools, or the cleverest people. They'll be the ones willing to dissolve their own disciplines, their hierarchies, their architectures - to give up the hard edges they've spent decades building and defending.

That's the part I don't know how to teach. Not how to swim. How to become the kind of organisation that's willing to let the water in.

Anyway...