I build with AI agents most days now - in the products I design, and in my own work. Some honest notes from the last year, with less hype than usual:
- The leverage is real, and it’s lumpy. Agents are extraordinary at the first draft and the boring middle, and still need a person for the last bit where taste and judgment live. Knowing where that line falls is the new skill.
- It rewards clear thinking. A vague prompt gets vague output, the same way a vague brief gets vague design. Writing a good spec for an agent is mostly just writing a good brief.
- Review is the bottleneck now. When generating is cheap, the scarce thing is the judgment to tell good from merely plausible. That’s a design skill, and it’s underrated.
- Craft didn’t go away - the floor and the ceiling both rose. More people can make a working thing, so the bar for what stands out goes up to match.
I’m not worried about AI flattening design. I’m more interested in what a small team of people with taste can do when the cost of trying things drops to near zero. So far the answer looks like: a lot.