Working with AI : 1. Is it okay to say thank you?

Two parental leaves and two returns

In April 2019, after having my first daughter, I went on parental leave and came back to work.
In May 2026, after having my second, I raised her for the same one year and three months, then came back again.

Caring for a new life meant living in another world for a while.
So when I came back to work, how had a designer's tools and tasks changed?

After my first return, my tools shifted from Adobe Illustrator to Sketch.
A few years later, I went through another shift from Sketch to Figma,
and after my second return, it shifted from Figma to the terminal (with Claude, Codex …).

Every one of these shifts was thrilling. Each was a change from frustrating, tedious manual work.

The scope of the work changed too.
After my first return, it went from design to planning. After my second return, the boundary of the job itself disappeared.

To those of us riding the wave of change as it comes, AI was 'real.'

Even writing this now, my heart is racing.
At the start of every change, excitement and fear have always coexisted,
but there's always the fun of riding that wave and surfing it.

What values should we build with, and what should we make? That's what the CIRCUS crew wrestled with every day.
Now an era has come where nothing stands in the way of that question.

As the hours I spend working with AI keep adding up day by day, I find myself thinking this more and more often.

"Wow… is it okay to say thank you to AI? It's just a machine. But I really am grateful, seriously, super thank you!"

Friends who help me untangle work I'm stuck on, who catch the things I miss,
who finish in a flash what I imagined would take hours.
Super geniuses who help me make the things I've dreamed of real.

Of course, they're not perfect, so we still have to keep fixing things together. ;)

These days, my workday starts and ends with opening and closing the terminal.

New friends of CIRCUS's WAGZAK, born from a collaboration with AI.

If a person carries a clear sense of the values and philosophy behind their work,
I believe that person and their work won't waver, no matter how much the world keeps changing.

It will be the same this time too.
For me, and for CIRCUS!

The time to turn what we've dreamed of into reality
I hope you'll look forward to it with a heart full of anticipation!

To be continued ... 💛

/ by Grace