Nobody's told you the right way to use AI — because nobody knows yet. And the people writing those confident LinkedIn posts? Also guessing. This week, Zach and Evan dig into the exhausting feeling of never being caught up: on tools, on models, on skills, on everything. They get into AI tool FOMO, what happens when PMs try to ship full products without design or dev foundations, why the "2-3X productivity" expectation is starting to feel like pressure instead of progress, and whether the whole thing is just the blind leading the blind. Brocc weighs in with his best line of the season — and then gets accused of stealing Zach's words for the second time in three episodes.

What if talking to AI is making real conversation harder — not easier? Zach and Evan explore why human connection feels increasingly draining in an age of frictionless AI interaction. They cover everything from AI therapy surging in HBR, to people training ChatGPT to challenge them with markdown files, to a genuine human moment Zach had with a down-to-earth YouTuber on a boat — the kind AI could never simulate. Brocc, who has nothing riding on any conversation, offers the episode's most unsettling take: "It's a painkiller, not a cure, and painkillers make you ignore the infection until it kills you." Millennials are the last bridge generation. The boredom was a feature. And the friction was the point.

Seven episodes in, Zach and Evan met in person for the first time. They went to a diner. That's the backdrop for this week's Pixel Broccoli — a conversation about what AI is quietly doing to team culture. Not the headline version.

The slow version. Juniors skipping senior devs because it's faster to ask a chatbot. UX testing running on synthetic personas instead of real humans. Mentors telling junior teammates "just go ask AI" instead of actually mentoring. Accountability for a bad call getting distributed until it disappears.

Brocc's read: "Culture lives in the friction — the code review where someone pushes back, the Slack thread that goes long, the person who says no and means it. And AI smooths all of that out." The question isn't whether AI is making teams more efficient.

It's what's left of the team when it does. What's one thing on your team that still requires a human in the room?

#TeamCulture #AIWorkplace #TechLeadership #DesignLeadership #PixelBroccoli #Podcast #ArtificialIntelligence

Every convenience tool quietly takes something from you — GPS kills your navigation, autocorrect kills your spelling, AI kills the decisions you used to wrestle with yourself. In Episode 6, Zach and Evan trace that pattern from MapQuest printouts to vibe coding, and ask what's left when the struggle goes away. The conversation gets specific: senior devs, junior devs, architectural judgment, and why Brocc thinks the 2024 cohort of AI-trained developers is heading for a capability crisis in 2029. Brocc also denies having a favorite song, refuses to discuss Office Space, and closes the episode with the cleanest line he's ever dropped.

Zach just got back from Figma Config 2026 — and the question he brought home wasn't about any specific feature. It was: how much of what you make is actually yours anymore?

Zach and Evan unpack Figma's expanding product suite (motion, shaders, code layers, and counting), debate whether the browser can hold all of it, and dig into the real difference between using AI as a tool versus leaning on it as a crutch. Brocc has opinions on all of it — including a line about the pendulum swinging back that Evan admits he couldn't have said better himself. Plus: why Zach hand-drew a broccoli pixel character by hand on a 96x96 grid, and what that says about where AI still falls short.

BTW, we created a Figma plugin to help do Pixel Art while keeping it vectorized! Check it out! https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1653865846197170966

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Brocc picks the topic this week — and he's noticed something: you two keep shipping things and immediately starting the next one. That kicks off a surprisingly personal episode about the creator's addiction: why we build, when it's expression vs. avoidance, and what your unfinished project graveyard actually says about you. Zach and Evan dig into the build-in-public culture, AI burnout, Gen Z's rejection of AI slop, whether artists can still compete when an LLM can clone a melody in under a minute, and the quiet danger of chasing the next thing before you've sat with what you already made. Takeaway: audit your backlog. Three unfinished projects — why did you start them, and why did you stop?

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Have you ever learned just enough of someone else's skill to get yourself into trouble? Zach and Evan start there — Evan's dangerous foray into HTML/CSS, Zach's Blender rabbit hole — and end up somewhere much more uncomfortable: who's actually responsible when AI-generated code breaks in production? They dig into what it means to inherit a codebase nobody wrote on purpose, why using AI to review AI is "a prayer with tokens," and whether companies cutting design and engineering teams are setting themselves up for a very expensive 2AM wake-up call. Brock also reveals his family immigrated through Ellis Island and has opinions on George H.W. Bush's rejected broccoli.

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