Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

The Burden of Precision

Explore how design tools impose unrealistic perfection, hindering creativity and innovation in today's design landscape. Embrace imperfection for better...

Design tools today confine us to an unrealistic and ill-advised goal: one of perfection. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch are highly precise, and demand precise output from Designers….

Read full article at the publisher’s site: https://daneden.me/2017/11/15/the-burden-of-precision/


Featured writing

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

You were trained to suppress yourself

Organizations didn't accidentally reward the machine-self. They engineered it. And you cooperated because it worked—until now.

Dev reflection - February 10, 2026

I want to talk about where complexity actually lives. Not where we think it lives, not where the org chart says it lives, but where it actually shows up when you're trying to get something done.

Dev reflection - February 09, 2026

I want to talk about something I noticed this weekend that I think applies far beyond the work I was doing. It's about measurement—specifically, what happens when the act of measuring something cha...