being the ai person

somewhere in the last two years i became the AI person on my team.

i didn’t apply for it. it happened gradually — i got curious, i started playing with tools, i ran a workshop, and then suddenly i was the one being asked “what should we do about AI?” by people who expected a confident answer.

i mostly don’t have one.

what i have is a lot of experiments. a lot of prompts that half-worked. a clear sense of which tasks it helps with and which ones it makes slower. and a growing suspicion that the people who sound most certain about where this goes are working from the same incomplete information i am.

the honest version of my AI position: i think it changes the craft without replacing the judgment. the things i’m most uncertain about are exactly the things that matter most — what happens to junior designers who used to grow by doing the tedious work, how to evaluate output when the process is invisible, whether “AI-assisted” becomes a mark of speed or a quiet signal that something was skipped.

i don’t know. i’m watching.

what i’ve found useful is treating it like any other material. you learn what it’s good at, what it distorts, where its defaults lead you somewhere worse. you develop taste about when to use it and when it flattens the thing you’re trying to make.

that’s not a framework. it’s just what i do.

the harder part is leading through that uncertainty. my team looks to me for signal. i try to give them honest signal — here’s what’s working, here’s what i’m skeptical of, here’s where i genuinely don’t know yet. i’d rather model good questions than fake a conviction i don’t have.

what i do feel certain about: the designers who will do well with AI are the ones who already know what good looks like. not because AI needs to be corrected constantly (though sometimes it does) — but because “good enough” is seductive when the output is fast and polished. you need a strong internal standard before the bar starts moving.

i’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. and i still don’t have a tidy conclusion. which is maybe the most honest thing i can say about where i’m at.

if you’re working on something and you’re not sure whether your design is actually communicating what you think it is, i offer structured design critique — analysis at the level of the argument, not the aesthetic. $75.