Opinionated Products – Designing with Belief (www.usamaasfar.com)

The piece argues that AI products should be “opinionated” — built around an explicit worldview or design philosophy — rather than assembled from a growing list of discrete features. Traditional software is deterministic: data in, rules out. Modern AI, by contrast, interprets, reasons and prioritizes; it needs a guiding belief about what matters and how to act when information is incomplete. Embedding a clear philosophy into agentic architectures means new tools and models adapt to that worldview instead of fracturing the product with ad‑hoc integrations, making systems more coherent, scalable and often cheaper to build. Technically, opinionated design reframes product architecture around internal reasoning structures and priors: context‑driven actions, collaborative agents, self‑correction mechanisms and consistent failure-handling become baked into behaviour rather than bolted on as features. The result is fewer brittle integrations, stronger system-wide assumptions, and predictable emergent behavior. The tradeoff is explicit: whoever defines the product’s “opinions” encodes values and constraints into autonomous reasoning, so design philosophy, governance and humane shared values become as important as model performance. The companies that win will be those that clarify what their systems believe and make those beliefs robust, transparent and aligned with users.