Timeless

I wrote The Problem-First Method trying to make it timeless.

I hoped the Autopay traps, the Juicero-style fever dreams, and the parking lot stakeholder math would still feel relevant in five years. Maybe ten.

Patterns are slow. Books are slow. I thought the book would age slowly too.

Then I opened LinkedIn this morning.

The opening case study in my book is Air Canada's 2022 chatbot that hallucinated a bereavement policy, sent a grieving customer to court, and got the airline ordered to pay damages because, as the tribunal put it, "it should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website."

It's 2026.

LLMs are better than they were when Jake Moffatt booked those tickets. And companies are still racing to hand frontline support to bots before anyone validates what customers actually need during their hardest moments.

Different model. Same dopamine. Same headlines.

A new face-palm screenshot seems to land in my feed every week. Refund policies invented in real time. Medical guidance delivered with confidence. Returns approved by a bot, then refused by the company that deployed it.

The technology changed.

The trap didn't.

The trap was always the seduction of shipping something that looks like progress while skipping the slower work of understanding what your customer is actually struggling with.

The Problem-First Method is out now: https://problem-first-method.com/