The debate around AI and design is framed in a way I do not find very useful.
People keep asking whether designers will get replaced by AI, as if the only possible outcomes are total replacement or no change at all. I do not think that is what is happening.
What I think is happening is simpler.
Top designers are not going away. If anything, they are about to become much more powerful. And at the same time, people who were never designers to begin with can now produce work that is finally good enough to ship.
AI design tools do not replace taste. They compress execution.
That is the shift.
For top-level designers, this is obvious leverage. If you already have strong taste, strong visual judgment, and the ability to create original work, these tools make you faster. Much faster. You can explore more directions, test more ideas, and work on more projects without losing quality. I think the best designers will become 10x designers.
Not because AI will do the creative work for them, but because it removes a lot of the friction between idea and execution.
But the more interesting part, at least for me, is what happens to everyone else.
Because these tools also do something else: they let non-designers become acceptable designers.
Not great designers. Not elite designers. But good enough to build something coherent, clean, premium enough, and aligned with the idea they had in mind.
These tools are incredible at taking people from 0 to 70. They are much worse at taking work from 70 to 100.
That is how I see it.
And honestly, that is already a huge change.
I Was Never The "Design" Person
I never considered myself a particularly creative person.
Most of my work has been on backend systems, infra, orchestration software, AI workflows, things that are much more about structure, logic, reliability, and execution than visual expression. That is naturally where I felt comfortable.
Design was not where I started. It was not where I felt strongest. And for a long time, that meant something simple: if I had an idea for how something should look or feel, I usually could not express it properly on my own.
I could have opinions. I could know when something felt off. I could collect references. I could describe what I wanted. But that is not the same thing as being able to turn it into a real landing page or a coherent visual system.
That is what changed for me.
Tools like Google Stitch, Claude Design, Figma MCP, and the whole new layer of AI-assisted design tools gave me something I did not have before: a bridge between vague creative instinct and actual output.
I did not become a designer overnight. I just gained a way to express ideas I could not express before.
That is the real difference.
I can now describe what I want in words, iterate much faster, react to visual proposals, refine structure, improve hierarchy, adjust tone, and slowly converge toward something that feels right.
That may sound obvious, but it is not.
Before these tools, there was a much bigger gap between "I know what I want" and "I can build it." Now that gap is smaller.
And that changes who gets to make things.
My Personal Website Is The Best Example
The easiest example is the website people are reading this on.
I recently refactored my personal site, and I am happy with the result. I think it looks clean. It feels coherent. It presents my work the way I want. It is not top-tier design, and it is not especially original. But it works well, and I am genuinely happy with it.
A few years ago, I would not have been able to make that site.
Not because I lacked ideas, but because I lacked the ability to turn those ideas into visual decisions that held together.
That is the part I think a lot of people underestimate.
For non-designers, the real unlock is not that AI suddenly makes us creative geniuses. The unlock is that it lets us structure and express creativity that was already there, but dormant.
A lot of people are not uncreative. They are under-equipped.
That is how it felt for me.
I always had taste in the loose sense. I knew what I liked. I knew the kind of sites, products, and interfaces that felt premium versus generic. But knowing that is not enough when you are staring at a blank canvas.
These tools help with that blank-canvas problem.
They give you a starting point. Then another. Then another. They make it easier to explore directions, reject bad ones, combine references, and push toward something more polished than what you could have made alone.
That matters a lot for builders.
Because now I can take an idea that previously would have stayed in my head, or in a rough sketch, and push it all the way to something live.
The Middle Is Going To Get Crowded
I think one thing that will happen very quickly is that average design quality will go up.
A lot more founders, engineers, operators, and solo builders will be able to ship decent-looking websites, landing pages, and product surfaces. Not exceptional ones, but respectable ones.
That matters.
Because for a long time, if you were not a designer, you had two options: either work with one, or accept that your own output would probably look rough. Now there is a third option. You can get much closer on your own.
That does not eliminate the need for great designers. It just means more people can now reach a baseline that used to be out of reach.
I think this is good for the internet, good for software, and good for builders.
It means more people can express ideas properly. More products can feel cared for. More founders can close the gap between what they imagine and what they ship.
And yes, it also means more average-good design will exist.
That is fine.
The world does not only need masterpieces. It also needs more things that are simply well made.