The Century-Old Vibe. What the Paris Metro taught me about building anything that lasts.
The City That Never Gets Old
It’s easy to lose the sense of excitement when you revisit a city too often. Yet, for me, this isn’t the case with Paris — a city I never tire of discussing.
I’ve seen the negative comments online about the city being dirty or unattractive. But that’s never been my perception. Just as you can’t entirely eliminate pests, you can’t expect any major city to be flawless.
Equipped with maps and Metro tickets, I’m always amazed by the efficiency of their train stations. I don’t know which is better — the system or the people.
The French will never speak to you in English even if they can. I once asked a lady for directions. She replied in a stream of French I didn’t understand and then left me standing there.
But I got on the right train. I arrived exactly where I was looking for.
Empathy Is Not Niceness
Her response wasn’t a failure of service. It was a testament to the system.
I didn’t need her to be nice — because the architects had already been clear.
In UX, we often confuse empathy with niceness. We think a system is empathetic only if it smiles at us or talks to us in our language.
But the Paris Metro was built on a higher level of empathy. It was designed for the local, yet understood by the global traveller — because it focused on universal human needs: simplicity and the removal of friction.
They built the foundation so well that the language of the signs became louder than the language of the people.
When the engineers and builders of the Paris Metro planned their system, they didn’t ask — what technology have we not used yet?
They asked — how can we build this for the next century to come?
Everyone Has A High-Speed Oven Now
Today, anyone can produce an app in an afternoon. The how has outrun the why.
I see apps built to solve problems that don’t exist. Someone building an Instant Reply AI for WhatsApp — just to help small businesses reply faster. How is this any different from the existing Quick Reply feature? Why create a complete FAQ just to reply better? Why slap AI on your product for the sake of making it better?
The noise says UX is cooked. That developers are obsolete. That the tools have replaced the thinking.
But having a high-speed oven doesn’t make you a Michelin-star chef.
Vibe Coding is a stage to test ideas. It is not a shortcut for intentionality.
If you aren’t talking to the user, if you aren’t building for the century, you aren’t designing.
You’re just playing with a new set of Legos.
The Question That Was Always There
The builders of the Metro didn’t prioritise the technical stack. They prioritised systemic longevity, user flow, and fundamental utility — aiming to serve the city for a hundred years.
Modern builders face the same choice. Every generation gets new tools. Every generation mistakes access for mastery. And every generation — eventually — rediscovers the same truth:
The question was never about the technology.
It was always about the person on the other end of it.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment. Briefings on human experience, UX, and business psychology — drawn from 30 years across airlines, banking, design, and the field.
— Lokman S