A few months ago I set up a folder structure on my computer and called it Holocron. Star Wars reference, yes, but the logic was earnest: a place where knowledge lives, organized well enough that I can hand it to an AI and have it understand what I'm working on, not a productivity system but more like a context layer for a collaborator who needs to be briefed every time we talk.
That project has become one of the more clarifying things I've done in a while.
The shift is structural.
When people talk about AI changing what it means to be a designer, the conversation collapses fast into anxiety: will it replace us, will it commoditize craft, what happens to junior roles. I've had that conversation more times than I can count this year.
The shift I'm going through looks different. In my role and what I've been to do is design the human-facing layer of AI systems: how people interact with agents, where AI surfaces in a workflow, what gets handed off to automation and what stays with a person. That is the work now.
The work has shifted from designing for AI to designing with it and designing it, and those are different problems. I'm still working out where existing skills transfer and where I'm in new territory.
The only way I've found to learn this is to build.
I read a lot, follow the research, and pay attention to what's shipping and what's vaporware, but none of that is the same as having a stake in making something work.
Holocron Ops, is the operational layer running on top of Claude, has been the most useful learning environment I've found. It functions as my personal assistant for evenings and weekends, covering evening check-ins, weekly reviews, brain dumps, and personal project pickups. Building for my own use forced a level of specificity no tutorial could.
What I've learned is mostly about context management and constraint design: the mechanics that make AI assistance useful rather than vaguely impressive, which comes down to knowing when to surface information and how much of it.
That carries into my day jobs well, because AI output reflects the quality of thinking you brought to it, and a lot of AI implementations fail there. The organization hasn't structured its knowledge, its decisions, its operating model, and then wonders why the AI isn't helpful, but the gap was never in the AI.
The honest mid-year position.
Six months in, the discourse about AI holds less of my attention than the work of figuring it out. Breathless optimism and defensive skepticism are both more comfortable than building something and watching it break.
The designers and leaders who come through this period well will be the ones willing to be bad at something new, to experiment without a clear ROI, and to build for themselves before they build for anyone else.
Where Holocron goes from here, I can't say. I'm currently exploring local models managed by a custom interface, still holding the Star Wars theme, but tasteful. Where the field goes, I can't say either, but I'm not watching from the sidelines, and for now that's a defensible position.