October 30, 2026 · Essay · 6 min read
How my 14 years of design changed in AI
Fourteen years of pushing pixels, running teams, and shipping products — and the last two rewrote the job description. Notes on what survived, what didn't, and what I'd tell 2012 me.
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What survived the shift
Taste, framing, and the ability to say no. The craft of knowing which problem is worth solving did not get automated — it got more valuable, because the cost of building the wrong thing beautifully just went to zero.
What didn't
The production moat. Fourteen years ago my edge was that I could make the thing look and feel right. Today a model can draft that in an afternoon — so the edge moved upstream, to judgment, and downstream, to shipping.
What I'd tell 2012 me
Learn to build earlier. Every year I spent handing off specs was a year of compounding I left on the table. The designers who thrive next aren't the ones AI can't replace — they're the ones AI multiplies.
The tools changed every five years. The job — seeing clearly and caring about people — never did.
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