Worried AI will replace designers? Think again. It’s more likely to make our work better, helping with the basics so we can focus on the big ideas.

Some people are worried that AI will make design useless, or that making things look perfect won’t matter anymore. I don’t think that’s right.

Let’s be real, getting designs to look exactly like our perfect ideas in our heads was often hard. We’d make great-looking examples, but the final thing we built? Not always as perfect. Things got rushed, and we skipped some of the small details. How many truly perfect designs do you actually see?

So, if AI makes things look a little less perfect (and I doubt it will!), It’s not a big deal. We weren’t always making things look totally perfect anyway.

But here’s the good news: AI isn’t going to take designers’ jobs. It’s going to help us do our jobs better. Think of it like having a really smart helper. AI can help with the basic design and coding stuff, especially if you’re not an expert. It’s like using ready-made pieces for websites or apps that give you a really good start.

This also means we need to think differently about how we keep our designs looking the same when we have lots of people working on them. We made rules for this before. Now, AI can quickly create good starting points for these rules, and then we can use AI or our skills to make them even better. AI might even be able to see design mistakes better than our old rule systems sometimes!

I’m also excited about designing things that are closer to how they work (the code). We shouldn’t spend so much time trying to make things look perfect in design tools like Figma. I use Figma to get the general idea right, but what people see and use is the code. AI can help connect these two things and make it easier to make the final code look good.

Now, if you already really care about design, like the people who made Linear, AI doesn’t change the main challenge. Making a clean-looking screen isn’t that hard once you’ve practised. The real hard work is thinking about how all the parts connect and how the whole thing works well together. That’s where the real creative thinking happens, and that’s something AI can’t do.

So yes, AI will make things faster and help us make more stuff. But I also think it will make good design more common.

In the end, great design still comes down to having good taste, thinking carefully about how everything fits together, and really caring about the person who’s going to use it. AI is a powerful tool, but it’s still just a tool that smart designers can use.