Reframing Design in the Age of AI

There’s a quiet shift happening in software design. A shift that makes some people anxious, others complacent, and a few unusually excited. The trigger, of course, is AI.

For the past decade, if you wanted to design a product, you had to know how to translate a vague idea into wireframes, prototypes, and polished screens. You had to grind. This grinding wasn’t glamorous, but it was the foundation of value. Designers were prized not only for their taste, but also for their ability to produce that taste into something others could use.

Now anyone can type a prompt into a tool like V0 or Cursor and get a halfway decent prototype. The AI doesn’t ask dumb questions. It doesn’t procrastinate. It produces something. Not always great, often generic, but undeniably something.

At first, this feels threatening. If software design can be automated, what’s left for the human designer?

The answer, as always, is: the part that can’t be automated.

The Assisted Layer

AI is already assisting large parts of the design process. Ideation, layout, wireframing, flows – the things once considered “the work” are becoming cheap, fast, and abundant. The results tend to look standard. Like off-the-shelf furniture: functional, but uninspired.

This doesn’t mean they’re useless. Far from it. But they no longer differentiate. They’re scaffolding. If your value as a designer is tied only to making screens appear in Figma, AI is already as good as you, or better, at that part.

The Differentiation Layer

But scaffolding isn’t the building.

The building is in the feel. The micro-interaction that makes a button feel alive. The animation that adds rhythm and warmth. The brand voice that whispers (or shouts) personality into the product. The story that ties features into a coherent experience.

These are not byproducts. They are the soul.

And here, humans still have an edge. Not because AI can’t generate animations or brand voices, but because taste is not a purely technical problem. Taste is subjective, contextual, and cultural. A machine can approximate, but only a human can say: this feels right, this feels alive, this feels like us.

The Designer as Editor

Think of the future designer less as a draftsman and more as an editor. AI can generate a hundred options. The designer’s job is to choose. To decide which flow, which metaphor, which motion aligns with the story.

The skill is not in moving rectangles, but in knowing why one rectangle should exist and another should not. The role of design shifts from creating raw material to curating and shaping it.

In other words, design becomes less about mechanics and more about judgment.

Design as Performance

There’s another way to frame this: design is becoming a performance.

The act of jamming in Figma, sketching flows, tweaking animations — this is not just about the artifact that comes out of it. It’s about the process itself, the rhythm of collaboration, the sense of intentionality that others can feel. When you show a prototype to someone and they say “wow,” it’s rarely because of the pixels alone. It’s because they sense the care behind them.

That care is hard to fake.

Raising the Ceiling

AI is lowering the floor. Anyone can get to decent now. That changes the game.

But the real opportunity is in raising the ceiling. In going beyond decent, beyond standard, into experiences that feel distinct, memorable, joyful. In a world flooded with “AI-generated prototypes,” the things that stand out will be those touched by human taste.

This doesn’t mean ignoring AI. It means using it as leverage. Let the machine handle the assisted layer so you can focus on the differentiation layer. Use AI to build scaffolding fast, then climb higher.

The New Job of Design

If you zoom out, the role of the designer is not disappearing. It’s evolving. From laborer to curator. From translator to taste-setter. From the person who makes rectangles to the person who decides which rectangles matter.

The work of design in the age of AI is to preserve and amplify what is human about software: individuality, story, rhythm, care.

Because most products still suck. And not because they lack features, but because they lack soul.

Conclusion

AI will keep getting better. One day it may even master micro-interactions, animations, branding, and storytelling. Maybe it already has in ways we don’t notice. But even if that happens, design will shift again.

The value of design has never been in the tools. It has always been in the judgment, the taste, the human flow that makes a product feel alive.

AI is not the end of design. It’s the end of standard design.

And that’s good news. Because it means the next era belongs to designers who know how to make software not just usable, but joyful.