The Uncomfortable Truth
I am tired of listening to or reading people’s contents about AI
Here’s an uncomfortable truth that’s truly unimaginable now to be said by a product designer. Even this post alone could cost me a job or opportunity.
I am tired of listening to or reading people’s contents about AI.
I am also tired of how fast it’s “progressing” by AI companies shipping new features every single minute.
I am also tired about the guilt-tripping, blackmailing tendency of “tech peeps” trying to undermine others if they don’t catch up.
But hear me out: it’s not that I am anti-AI. I am just anti-hype. I don’t want a tool or a vehicle to overpower anything that’s more precious.
I grew up as a student in early 2000s hungry about web design. Back then, you either learned to “code” frontend languages (HTML, CSS, and JS), or you use one of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools like Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or something similar. There was no web-based or desktop app of a canvas design tool like Figma, Sketch or something similar. My first toolset was Corel PhotoPaint or Adobe Photoshop, to generate some designs, export/slice assets and build on either code or WYSIWYG tools. Then uploaded them through FTP. Beautiful days.
No social media to debate about who does it better, or what tools one must learn in the next 24 hours to still be employable in the next five years, because by 2030, you’ll be starving and out of any job.
Here’s the problem: I never like people imposing tools and processes. Okay, they might be something you need to keep marketable and employable, and it’s likely that most product design teams will utilise Claude Code + Figma or something like that, with addition of different tools here and there that are still powered by AI. However, the rate in which people and teams push us to the limits induces anxiety for me.
In the past, I’ve always enjoyed the process of creating, designing. Some manual work were appreciated and truly savoured. It is in the slowness of time and intentionality that we find our footings in our design process. Maybe while listening to music, or reading people’s blogs about how-tos. I remember we had to hack our way to even use a proper desktop font using sIFR. We also had to learn how to name our CSS classes semantically. Bought books, perused them and endlessly trying stuff.
Today, people seem to claim that they could do an app within 1 hour or a weekend, an they feel empowered and energised. They would also spend hours trying and exploring all these new toys.
However, the breakneck speed of things and the lack of process in between has been disturbing.
Most designer-AI-slash-product posts have been either about:
how to set things up! what tools to use!
hey look I made this in one hour (I am also guilty of this)
why you will lose this AI race, join us now, old way is broken
my tooling is better than yours
my process is better than yours
you will lose your job
Compare these to the heydays of web design in the early 2000s up to 2010:
people sharing in-depth articles on their blogs about technicalities like…
how to create a CSS-only navigation
hacking to use desktop fonts through sIFR
designing a skeuomorphic Wordpress themes
people sharing their design process for
icon design
illustration
type design
people sharing inspiration from
their trips
cars
everyday objects
annoying encounters at the supermarket
books
other people’s articles
It feels like the soul is missing. The soul of humans actually trying to solve problems creatively. All that I see are humans trying to solve problems technically, and quickly. Scale is important but it feels like it’s getting too fast to scale up, and we don’t ever pause to ponder.
To wonder.
To think and feel.
To be honest, it’s not the design field I genuinely enjoy anymore. Now that I am 40+, I crave more for trial and error, discovery and exploration. Not necessarily a hacky weekend trying to ship a small vibe-coded tool that people don’t use, but something more of a creative pursuit: documenting design process for my website, why I go that way, not necessarily what stack I built it with.
People obsess about stacks and technical framework more than the why and how they design it.
It’s a problem for me.
I am now 40, and I probably have 15 years left in my design career. Honestly, I do not know what I want, and even if I do, how I will go about it.
Before you judge me, also hear me out for the last time: It’s not that I am anti-AI. I still use AI in my work, mostly because the industry demands it, and we have shareholders to keep up with. But deep down inside, I think we are losing the soul of our… craft. Our work. Our profession. If you still think that’s valuable of a term.