AI can design a screen.
It can't design an experience.

I use AI every day in various ways as part of my production workflow.

But I'm starting to see a gap open up, and it worries me a bit.

The bit that gets skipped

Ask AI for a UX flow and it'll give you something clean. A journey, some screens, a happy path from start to finish.

What it won't give you, unless you push hard for it, is the mess. What happens when the user fails. What the next step looks like when things don't go to plan. The five steps on from the one everyone's designing for.

Those are the bits that actually make a product usable. And they're the bits I'm seeing skipped more and more.

Habits don't live in a prompt

Good UX has never really been about the happy path. It's about knowing how people behave when they're tired, distracted, confused, or in a rush. It's about the habits they've already built from a hundred other products before they ever touched yours.

That comes from watching people use things. From testing, from failing, from sitting with a user while they get stuck and trying to work out why. It's earned, not generated.

AI can pattern match against a huge amount of existing design. What it can't do is understand your specific users, in your specific context, with their specific habits. It doesn't know your users. It knows patterns.

Speed isn't the same as thinking

The risk isn't that AI produces bad output. Often it's genuinely good. The risk is that it's fast, and fast is tempting when there's pressure to ship.

So the thinking that used to happen before a single screen got designed, the questioning, the "what if this fails" conversations, is quietly getting skipped. Not because people don't care, but because the tool has already handed them something that looks finished.

Looking finished and being considered are not the same thing.

Where I land on this

AI is brilliant at getting me to a starting point faster. It's not a replacement for understanding people.

The products that actually work well are still built by people who've sat with users, watched them struggle, and designed for the moments that don't go to plan. That's not something I want AI to take off my plate. It's the part of the job I actually care about.