AI Gave Me Déjà Vu. Then I Remembered McLuhan.

Welcome to my first post. I’m a Product designer, a AI explorer, and a mom of two. Most of my best thinking happens in stolen moments — early mornings, lunch breaks, and Saturday afternoons when the kids are finally down for their nap. This newsletter is where I put those thoughts. Design, AI, tech, and the very real experience of trying to keep up with a fast moving world while also keeping tiny humans alive.

Thanks for being here.

I studied mass communications more than ten years ago. My intro to communications class started with McLuhan — the medium is the message. I remember sitting there thinking okay, what does that even mean.

It means the medium itself changes you. Not just what you consume — how you think, how you see, how you operate. Television didn’t just bring content into living rooms. It created couch culture, attention spans, a whole new type of storytelling. Smartphones didn’t just connect people. They made everyone a publisher, a photographer, a broadcaster.

Every new medium created a new kind of person.

I keep thinking about this lately. Maybe too much — I’m probably looking at everything through a philosophical lens. But that’s what a mass communications degree does to you, I guess. You can’t unsee the patterns.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: AI feels different from every other tool I’ve used. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I think it’s because it changed my role.

Every app tells you — you’re a builder now. No code needed. Just build. But I don’t feel like a builder. I feel more like a director. I describe what I want, and it appears. I’m experimenting with websites, apps, voice interaction. All through prompting. And the strange thing is — the less I’m doing manually, the more I’m actually thinking.

When you’re not executing, you start noticing. You develop opinions about interfaces. You know immediately when something feels off. You start using design language naturally because you have to — it’s the only way to get what’s in your head out into the world.

As a product designer, that part surprised me the most. I thought AI would make design thinking less important. Instead it made it more essential. You can’t direct something you don’t understand. Taste isn’t optional anymore — it’s the whole job.

I don’t know if that makes me a better designer. But it’s making me a sharper one.

McLuhan said the medium is the message. I was living it — every new technology quietly reshaping how I think, how I see, how I operate. And now, a Saturday afternoon, kids down for their nap, sitting and prompting — I’m feeling it again.

Pure déjà vu.