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🦄 Stop shipping “friendly” AI copy

January 14, 2026

Hey 👋

You can ship a lot of “smart” UI this year while quietly making it less trustworthy, less coherent, and harder to operate.

This week is about picking the boring defaults that keep humans in the loop: strip fake personality from AI copy, make cross-team dependencies visible before you “empower” anyone, and design automation like a controllable tool, not an opinionated ghost.

Dig in & Enjoy 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.

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🏗️ Build

Make better interfaces.

Humanizing AI Is a Trap

The useful bit is the clear line between polite system feedback and full-on human cosplay, plus why “warmth” often trades off against reliability. This shows up in design review when someone wants the assistant to sound “friendly” and you end up shipping filler, not help.

Why it matters: Teams add personality to cover model limits, which raises expectations and increases errors, so design the UI copy to be direct and tool-like instead.

Adopt this week: Use an “AI copy red flags” checklist for any assistant UI.

AI copy red flags (delete if N/A):
  - No first-person “I/me” unless required for clarity
  - No emotional validation (“Love this…”, “You’re right…”)
  - No “thinking”/mind-language for compute or waits
  - Output starts with the answer, not pleasantries
  - States limits (what it can’t do) in plain language

🧩 Shape

Shared foundations across teams.

Why Most Product Teams Aren't Really Empowered

This bites when a team is “empowered” to fix onboarding, then discovers navigation and half the page is owned elsewhere. Empowerment without shared component ownership turns into meetings, documents, and a Franken-solution.

Why it matters: Organisations say “own outcomes” while splitting screens across teams, which creates coordination tax and incoherent UI. Make dependencies visible and agree a decision path for shared components.
Adopt this week: Create a one-page “shared screen map” for your top 1 journey and store it next to your design system docs.

Strategic Portfolio Management Meets Product-Centricity

The thing that changes in planning is naming what is actually movable, because teams and systems are not liquid assets you can rebalance without consequences. If your roadmap assumes you can stop work and instantly “free capacity”, you are already lying to yourself.

Why it matters: Leaders treat investment like a spreadsheet reallocation, which hides irreversible coupling and creates churn, so answer the irreversibility questions before you commit.

Try this: Add these questions to your next planning doc (20–30 mins) and keep the answers as decision notes under the initiative header.

Planning sanity check:
  1) What is the true unit here (team, flow, or long-lived system)?
  2) If we stop, what actually gets freed, and what stays entangled?
  3) What would make this decision reversible, and what would we roll back?

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🚀 Ship

Release, measure, iterate.

Who’s spotting you when you automate

Stop shipping automation that only works when everything goes right. The practical frame here is operational UX that shows boundaries and time context, especially around approval gates and rollback moments.

Why it matters: Automation relocates responsibility but hides boundaries, which erodes trust and pushes people back to manual control, so make escalation, notification, and rollback behaviour obvious.
Adopt this week: For one automated approval gate, add a “Changed / Why / Watch” block, including who is notified and the rollback path.

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Thanks for reading

Adam from Unicorn Club

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