Developers who use AI think they're quicker and better, but they're actually slower and worse. Not surprised to hear it's similar in other fields. AI in general, just like drugs, makes people feel good but without any actual substance behind the feeling.
(If feeling without substance is all you need, then it's okay to use AI. AI Dungeon, for example, was pretty cool. Or slide backgrounds that would have otherwise been solid colours because they're worth $0 and you wouldn't have paid a designer.)
I'd add a #3 to the "explainable with" list: the trend towards relentlessly outsourcing work, often in situations where you get 1/2 the quality on 2x the timeline, because it's still cheaper than good engineers and the ostensible relentless time pressure turns out to not exist if offshore workers are cheap enough.
Because art, commercially viable art, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspirarion. AI can generate the first inspirational image but cannot do the 99%, all the hard work, to turn that image into a viable product.
I think it raises the bar on what’s needed to be a designer, but I don’t think it replaces the need for a designer.
I’d draw parallels to web design. Yes some frameworks made it incredibly easy for anyone to whip up a decent looking professional site. But then 95% of websites were the same boring single page scroll nonsense with some fancy CSS. It checks a box but isn’t notable. If you hire a designer to do something truly original then you can stand out.
It will be the same with AI where “good enough to check the box” becomes easy, but going beyond that still requires skill and experience.
Design is one of those things that succeeds or fails in subtlety and both are difficult to quantify and back propagate through any sort of process, let alone training a model. The same way we figured out that the microwave can make approximations to good food quickly, so too shall we see that AI can do the same with tasks that rely heavily on a connection to people's aesthetics.
LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones.
The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages require nuance to understand the client and their branding (which clients often struggle to articulate themselves), and that's not something current models can capture.
The number one thing that AI is lacking is taste, precisely the reason we need designers in the first place. An engineer (most engineers are not designers) alone, or an LLM is not thinking about good design principles and doing the things needed to develop good taste.
It's the reason why LLMs are horrible at writing, and the reason why good design is really hard to get out of an LLM. Figma Make and Claude Code are really just using the out of the box CSS from shadcn that's why everything looks the same.
In some sense it is happening. But as alluded to in the article its going to be from the bottom up. I use AI designs for my slides and videos. Are they as good as a professional designer? No. Not even close really. Is it better than me? Yes. Not even close really.
The thing is on a computer today is that most design is prepackaged and not customized to what I'm doing. AI gets me a big step closer to that so much so that it is preferable to most of the prepackaged work done by a professional designer. Again, if I had a professional designer next to me to do slides and videos then that would be better, but very few people have that.
Lots of these discussions are simplifying design to 'making things look pretty'. That's just not true for even the more visual-based design disciplines like graphic design. And the 'regular' product design (ux/ui/ixd) happening in most tech companies has very little of this compared to the rest of the scope of what a designer really does.
Product design isn't a layer that you apply. It's not an output of some prompt. It's a difficult-to-define process of crafting the interface between the user and product's functionality.
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
> My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation
I've heard some anecdotal evidence that designers are starting to use AI tools to help them build working interactive prototypes of their designs, but I don't have enough day-to-day contact with professional design teams to have a good feel for how widespread that is and what impact it's having on the process.
To me, the key quote is the simple "If you had told me in late 2022 I’d be saying these things 3 years later, I would’ve been pretty surprised." As someone with little exposure to the design industry, seeing how quickly AI could generate images, I'd been under the assumption that the AI takeover was already well underway there, so was surprised to learn that it's not.
If anything, that gives some comfort around the future of engineering job prospects. While there's still room to worry, "yeah but design is fundamentally human, while engineering is mostly technical and can be automated", I'm sure, just as design has realized, that when we get to a point where AI should be taking over, we'll realize that there's a lot of non-technical things that engineers do, that AI cannot replace.
Basically, if replacing a workforce is the goal, AI image generators and code generators look like replacement technologies from afar, but when you look closer you realize they're "the right solution to the wrong problem", to be a true replacement tech, and in fact don't really move the needle. And maybe AI, by definition of being artificial and intelligence (as opposed to real common sense) as a whole, is fundamentally an approach that "solves the wrong problem" as a replacement tech, even as AGI or even ASI gets created.
> After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster
This does not match my experience. I have been using Claude for speeding up design. Describe your page and ask it to use Tailwind and it will come up with some interesting designs. You still need a designer because some designs it comes up with are over the top, and need to be moderated.
"After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster"
This is antidotally untrue. I work for a small startup. We don't have the money / aren't willing to pay for a full-time designer. So, let's just say, our UI design has always been pretty terrible. With AI, using claude, to generate design and HTML / CSS based on requirements, the design that has been generated has been heads and tails better than anything we ever came up with alone.
I totally agree with this post. The AI only helped the scammers who sell courses, claiming they made so much money from their crappy mobile apps or their other types of web apps. It is just a social media hype. Can a newbie without any understanding of database structures or modular design create a perfect flow? With the current technology, it is not possible. People are so impatient to understand what it takes to make a functioning app, to create a structured app flow, so the vibe coding project gets messy in a few prompts. It is just a hype, at least for coding, and people will soon realize it.
Suno and image generators are totally different and riding the AI wave at the moment. YouTube turned into crap, and Instagram content as well. AI fatigue is here.
Design moves at the speed of culture; not technology. It took 3 years of people messing with mobile phones before it occurred to someone to implement "pull down to refresh" and much longer for it to be common practice that people just expect from UX. I think people are still learning what they want from an AI experience.
I do think you have to be pretty targeted with your predictions, though. Consumer product design seems to be evolving differently from B2B and at a different pace. Growth curves are different for each.
I thought a huge part of the perceived value of ChatGPT etc. is the ability to bypass the work of designers. The whole dream of AI is not having to deal with what someone else thought the solution to your problem was, and instead just skipping to the end.
I’ve designed interfaces that have stood the test of time and the criticality of their use. I’ve created before there were design systems/tokens, the bootstraps, and the tailwinds. They are used spanning decades in clinics, hospitals, publishing houses, banking, and by many other MNCs to deploy interesting products.
The current AI and design is in a honeymoon period, focused more on experimentation and functional components, using working design patterns, philosophies, templates, and components in abundance. I trust that it is indeed a good thing to accept “Good Enough Design” and layer in the better and best ones later. Right now, we have good enough designs everywhere.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] thread(If feeling without substance is all you need, then it's okay to use AI. AI Dungeon, for example, was pretty cool. Or slide backgrounds that would have otherwise been solid colours because they're worth $0 and you wouldn't have paid a designer.)
This first chart should be absolutely damning: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
I’d draw parallels to web design. Yes some frameworks made it incredibly easy for anyone to whip up a decent looking professional site. But then 95% of websites were the same boring single page scroll nonsense with some fancy CSS. It checks a box but isn’t notable. If you hire a designer to do something truly original then you can stand out.
It will be the same with AI where “good enough to check the box” becomes easy, but going beyond that still requires skill and experience.
The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages require nuance to understand the client and their branding (which clients often struggle to articulate themselves), and that's not something current models can capture.
It's the reason why LLMs are horrible at writing, and the reason why good design is really hard to get out of an LLM. Figma Make and Claude Code are really just using the out of the box CSS from shadcn that's why everything looks the same.
The thing is on a computer today is that most design is prepackaged and not customized to what I'm doing. AI gets me a big step closer to that so much so that it is preferable to most of the prepackaged work done by a professional designer. Again, if I had a professional designer next to me to do slides and videos then that would be better, but very few people have that.
Product design isn't a layer that you apply. It's not an output of some prompt. It's a difficult-to-define process of crafting the interface between the user and product's functionality.
> I am utterly disgusted. ... I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc
or David Simon:
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1177569966
Best summary I've heard so far
If anything, that gives some comfort around the future of engineering job prospects. While there's still room to worry, "yeah but design is fundamentally human, while engineering is mostly technical and can be automated", I'm sure, just as design has realized, that when we get to a point where AI should be taking over, we'll realize that there's a lot of non-technical things that engineers do, that AI cannot replace.
Basically, if replacing a workforce is the goal, AI image generators and code generators look like replacement technologies from afar, but when you look closer you realize they're "the right solution to the wrong problem", to be a true replacement tech, and in fact don't really move the needle. And maybe AI, by definition of being artificial and intelligence (as opposed to real common sense) as a whole, is fundamentally an approach that "solves the wrong problem" as a replacement tech, even as AGI or even ASI gets created.
This does not match my experience. I have been using Claude for speeding up design. Describe your page and ask it to use Tailwind and it will come up with some interesting designs. You still need a designer because some designs it comes up with are over the top, and need to be moderated.
This is antidotally untrue. I work for a small startup. We don't have the money / aren't willing to pay for a full-time designer. So, let's just say, our UI design has always been pretty terrible. With AI, using claude, to generate design and HTML / CSS based on requirements, the design that has been generated has been heads and tails better than anything we ever came up with alone.
Suno and image generators are totally different and riding the AI wave at the moment. YouTube turned into crap, and Instagram content as well. AI fatigue is here.
I do think you have to be pretty targeted with your predictions, though. Consumer product design seems to be evolving differently from B2B and at a different pace. Growth curves are different for each.
Can’t fit all that in a million tokens.
The current AI and design is in a honeymoon period, focused more on experimentation and functional components, using working design patterns, philosophies, templates, and components in abundance. I trust that it is indeed a good thing to accept “Good Enough Design” and layer in the better and best ones later. Right now, we have good enough designs everywhere.