Insights from Nebo

Something’s…off. You don’t remember exactly when it happened, but now you can’t unsee it. Every ad features an uncanny, poreless face. Every voiceover has the same eerie sing-song cadence. Every tagline reads as if it were written by a committee of aggressively average clones. You thought the future would be more like Blade Runner: Replicants running around trying to pass as humans and slick, dazzling holographic adverts. Instead, the robots are just boring us to death.

The em dash. Odds are you’ve heard of it — and maybe you’re offended by the way I just used it. You wouldn’t be alone. 

In 2026, the em dash has become a symbol of AI slop. A red flag that something was written by a machine and not a human. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion on this punctuation mark. Most of those opinions are: stop using it.

And I’m here to say: over my dead body.

I’m a professional writer and I refuse to give up the em dash — and you should too. Here’s why.

In my early days as a UX designer, I was taught that you must follow ALL the steps of the textbook UX process to a T.

Research → Define → Design → Validate → Ship.

What a lovely thought. Neat! Linear! Predictable! But as we all know, that’s rarely how projects go.

If I hear “SEO is dead” one more time, I’m gonna lose it.

The fearmongering behind AI, LLMs, and the “death of SEO” has to stop. John Lennon settled this in 1971 when he said the war is over. The Star Wars franchise ended it with a party on Endor with the Ewoks (sorry, Adam Driver). And the Avengers laid it to rest once and for all when they defeated Thanos just so Peter Parker could go back to high school. 

We’ve seen this play out before. New technology emerges, and suddenly it’s framed as a replacement rather than an evolution. But that framing misses the bigger picture: search isn’t dying, it’s evolving.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing the new blockbuster hit, based on the book of the same name, Project Hail Mary. The movie starred Ryan Gosling as Grace and a fantastic alien named Rocky. I heard good things going in, but it still managed to exceed my expectations. The premise was fascinating, and the filmmakers did an amazing job with the script and cinematography. Gosling, in particular, deserves a ton of credit for anchoring such an emotionally demanding role while still bringing moments of levity along the way.

In the ever-changing world of product design, roles across teams are starting to shift and blend. User experience designers are helping more with Product Requirement Documents (PRDs), product managers are building MVPs in Lovable or Figma Make, and almost everyone is a certified engineer now. In this new environment, being an exceptional designer is no longer defined by how well you can use Figma to create pixel perfect products. It’s about how well you think like a strategist.

I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum. I’ve been a UX designer at a 400,000+ person corporation, where the product team alone was 250+ members. It was easy to feel like a small cog in a massive machine. At Nebo, I collaborate with folks from every team involved in each project, including our client. The difference isn’t just the headcount, it’s the proximity to the “why.”