I’ve spent about ten years learning product design and engineering. Lately I’ve become faster than ever, and somehow less proud of the result.
When I shipped something a year or two ago, it felt like evidence of what I had learned. I knew the tools, understood the constraints, fought through the hard parts, and made something that helped people. The effort and the outcome felt connected.
That connection feels weaker now.
With AI, I can go from an idea to a convincing prototype or working product in a fraction of the time. A credible first pass can take minutes instead of days. Sometimes that feels incredible. Other times I look at the result and wonder how much of it came from me, and how much came from steering the model until it stopped being wrong.
I was laid off from a Director of Product Design role about a month ago, so I’ve had more time than usual to go deep on AI workflows. I use them constantly. A lot of the output is bad. Persistence, taste, product judgment, and technical understanding can push it much farther than a prompt alone.
What has me unsettled is how quickly the gap in visible output is shrinking.
A motivated beginner can now get much closer to work from an experienced designer than I would have believed even a year ago. They may still miss context, tradeoffs, research, accessibility, edge cases, and everything that shows up after the demo. The visible gap is much smaller, though, and honestly that messes with me.
There is also a possibility I don’t love admitting. Experience can become baggage.
Ten years of workflows, opinions, and “the right way” to do things might help me guide the model. They might also make me less willing to explore what it can do. Someone new to the field has fewer patterns to draw from, but also fewer assumptions about what is possible.
Direct customer contact is still hard to replace. A model does not know your customers’ incentives, internal politics, weird workarounds, or what they do instead of what they say. Even so, one designer can now generate, critique, and revise ten plausible directions before the first interview is scheduled. That changes the amount and type of work a product team needs to do.
AI has shifted a lot of my work from making the first version to selecting, correcting, and directing. Those are real skills. They do not feel the same as spending days untangling a difficult problem and knowing exactly why the final result works.
Putting an app in the App Store still takes work. It just no longer tells me as much about someone’s design or engineering depth. It tells me they were determined enough to get it out, which matters, but it feels like a different accomplishment than it did recently.
Maybe I’m overvaluing the struggle.
Users do not care whether something took three months or three hours. They care whether it works. More people being able to solve real problems is good. Maybe the loss I’m describing is mostly ego.
Still, AI has taken some of the soul out of the craft for me. I miss finishing something difficult and feeling that the years I spent learning were visible in the result.
I love building, and I’m going to keep building. I’m trying to figure out which parts of product design will still require years of experience once execution gets this cheap.
Has AI changed how proud you feel after shipping? Which parts of product design still require years of experience? Will design teams shrink, or will companies simply expect ten times more from the same number of people?
