The Dash: Wed, Nov 4

Here’s everything from this week’s Dash. Which one stood out for you?

Critical thinking when agents do the work (Addy Osmani)
A long read on keeping your judgment sharp while using AI. You should be able to defend everything you ship.
https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2117512471930167377

The state of hiring in the content industry (Rahel Anne Bailie)
Our job titles no longer match the work. Employers want content architecture, systems thinking and quality control for AI.
https://www.content-seriously.com/p/the-state-of-hiring-in-the-content

Writers of Silicon Valley: Inside Intuit’s content design plugin (Sarah Mohs and Eva Ratcliffe)
The final episode. What happens when everyone at a company builds their own Claude skill, and how Intuit pulled them back into one plugin.
https://www.writersofsiliconvalley.com/episodes/sarah-mohs-eva-ratcliffe

The Haunting of Content Design: Some doors stay shut (Mette Hatorp)
How one team sorted its work into what AI can speed up, what needs a content designer’s judgment, and what AI shouldn’t touch.
https://medium.com/@m_tuliniushatorp/the-haunting-of-content-design-some-doors-stay-shut-0187db309c5e

Building a context layer for AI (Nicole Bankowski, PayPal)
A record of a team’s content decisions and the reasons behind them, so AI works from what’s already been decided.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7523113506137788416/

Chalkline: a writing system your team owns
Keep your voice, terminology and channel rules in Markdown files that AI agents check before they write.
https://block.github.io/chalkline/

SOUL.md and AGENTS.md for content designers (Elisa Trippetti)
A no-code way to test the instruction files your AI agents run on.
https://elisa-trippetti.medium.com/soul-md-and-agents-md-for-content-designers-c152c971ac58

AI workslop is a standards problem (Atlassian Teamwork Lab)
Teams that agree on what good looks like produce less polished-but-empty AI work.
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ai-at-work/ai-workslop-is-a-standards-problem

The words have eyes (Aaron Weatherford)
Why we need to change how we talk about cookies, and what cookie messages teach people about data collection.
https://medium.com/@schmelzeraaron/the-words-have-eyes-lets-de-normalize-the-language-of-surveillance-e57e55ffd5ef

Innovation in Content Design (London, November 17)
A free evening of talks at Mastercard’s London office on how content design is changing.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/innovation-in-content-design-tickets-2004292067528