AI is not doing design
It’s exciting to be a designer right now. New tools promising to revolutionize the design process are popping up left and right, with Claude Design being the latest. It’s also scary to be a designer right now because you can easily get the impression that these tools — that AI in general — is going to take your job; it’s just a matter of time.
When these thoughts occur, I try to remind myself that what AI is doing is not design. Sure, it creates visual artifacts that look good, prototypes that show interaction, and working apps that can be used by people — all from a simple text prompt. Claude Design can even import existing design systems, let you edit inline, and hand the result straight to Claude Code for production.
But that’s not design.
It’s a workflow that lets you produce more variations in less time. Valuable, but only if signal, taste, and judgement are provided to steer the process.
Design is not the art of producing. It’s easy to fall for this because what people see and talk about are the visual artifacts. Mockups, visual designs, prototypes, design systems. Besides, it is tempting to talk about these things “looking good“. After all, that’s what you see.
AI is very good at looking good enough. It’s great at average. But when everybody starts to use the same models to generate the same generic outputs, products will look the same. Average and good enough. Not a bad experience, but undifferentiated. Sooner or later, though, when every competitor can generate such an experience in minutes, being undifferentiated will be the same as being invisible.
The value of design
What design really is about is not how it looks, but how it works. It’s about choosing the right problem to solve for your customers, in a way that works for them. It’s understanding the problem and the people well enough to decide what and how a solution should exist at all.
Design is about knowing what to build and why. AI can’t do that for you. It will only amplify the good, the bad, and the useless. It enables anyone to generate an interface that looks professional and “good enough“. What it doesn’t provide is the thinking underneath. The strategy, the research, the understanding, and the taste.
The trap that is now easy to fall into is to skip the important underlying work of understanding and go straight to the outputs. That can be outright dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re building and why, you don’t know what good looks like. AI lets you move faster, but without the right direction, you might be wasting a ton of money, time, and attention on the wrong idea.
Using AI to realize an idea and bring it to life can be of great help and accelerate the process. But a human designer is needed to ensure you’re applying AI to something worth accelerating. They bring taste, judgment, and understanding, and thus they can reduce the cost of doing the wrong thing. While AI generates a lot of potential answers really fast, a designer can help you pick the right one and say no to the rest.