AI made everyone a designer. It didn't teach anyone taste.
Recently, I've been seeing more Figma mocks or prototypes shared by people who aren't designers. And I'm really glad everyone can turn any idea into something visual.
For the first time, ideas don't have to stay abstract or live in a Google Doc. Anyone can bring them to life in a few minutes. But most of these designs feel off.
Not because the ideas are bad, but because they almost always add more than they remove. It's so easy now to stack features, optimize for one more metric, or create a new entry point for a new idea. Very quickly, the product becomes more complex than ever. People don't care about all of that, they just want something simple that works.
What's also missing is the extra mile. The level of quality, care, and craft that makes something actually shippable. The layer that makes an experience feel special and unique. That's where design really happens. Being able to generate something is not the same as understanding if it's good or not.
AI made everyone able to design. It didn't make anyone able to judge design.
I don't think the idea has ever been the blocker. Most of the time, the real blocker has been execution. I've pitched ideas I thought were great, and the reaction was often neutral. But when the execution was right, everything changed.
For example, I got a lot of feedback on video controls. People had opinions, but nothing really clicked. It's only when I built a clean, final prototype of the full experience that felt like a system that people reacted differently. The same idea felt more obvious and exciting. A good idea with bad execution feels like a bad product, and a simple idea with great execution can feel amazing.
The bar is going to be much higher.
Today, anyone can rebuild a messaging app in a night, so we can't hide behind complexity anymore. We can't afford rough edges, broken flows, bad spacing, or average experiences. Products need to feel special now. Users will expect to feel a level of care and attention behind every pixel. They should feel the love in the details, not the pressure of a feature being pushed on them.
AI never says no.
AI is designed to help and move things forward. It almost never tells you: "this is a bad idea." Critical thinking becomes more important than ever. Otherwise, we'll end up building a lot of things we would have rejected in the past, simply because we can build them fast.