AI design tools are actively degrading design.
The push for an idea → polished artifact is entirely incorrect and dangerous.
Let me dictate with AI and brainstorm with it… dump my thoughts, a few transcripts from Granola, have a back and forth with the smartest model, and generate a few variations of the problem I am solving — or the idea I have. In minutes, I have a semi-polished artifact (or 3 variations of it!) that I can iterate on using the latest, fastest, smartest models.
Voila, AI cooked… works well, is smooth, and has these cool animations I didn’t even ask for!!
Now tell me why it felt great. Why this specific composition over the other? What were the trade-offs? What response is this supposed to evoke? What is it not? Why was the uninstructed animation created?
You’ve become the interpreter of a machine’s decisions.
When you front-load thinking to AI and allow it to organize, synthesize, deconstruct, you relegate decision-making. You end up letting a pattern-recognition formula (one with little to no context on your problem) decide what should exist, why, and where.
Every opaque decision creates downstream confusion.
A screen has tens to hundreds of decisions. A product houses tens of thousands. When each one loses clarity in why it exists, cognitive debt compounds and costs tenfold to unwind.
Vibe design is cheap dopamine for people who want to feel productive without doing the work of turning ideas into clear, reasoned decisions.
Cognitive debt doesn’t show up on launch day. It shows up six months later when nobody can explain why the product works the way it does. The K curve will be apparent soon.
But AI can be great for design. It must be scaffolded around the decision layer, not the production layer. When anyone can create anything. The differentiator is knowing why something should exist in the first place… and then focus on the how.
Good design is how much thought we put behind each decision that makes up the whole.
written in San Francisco, CA