I’ve spent the last two decades building a tool belt. Like most in the creative space (if you were born in the 80s or 90s), we started with Adobe products, shout-out to MS Paint. This started in high school and lasted through college and into the 2010s… it had a good run. Then Sketch wow’d us for a few years, heavily reducing file management, file size, and version control. But then Figma showed up, followed by Webflow, Framer, and a mess of others. Throw in some “Design Thinking,” and you have yourself a set of tools. I’ve written before about the Efficiency Paradox, that awkward moment where you use a front-end loader to do a shovel’s job, and the client asks why you’re still charging for the sweat.

But lately? The front-end loader just started driving itself. And it’s wearing a very clean, very generic, and very terrifying uniform.

I remember sitting in a discovery session last year. The client wanted a “disruptive fintech experience.” We spent weeks on mood boards, design languages, the psychological impact of hierarchy and placement, and mapping out user journeys that accounted for every human whim. We were craftsmen, architects of the digital world.

Fast forward to last October, 2025. I’m sitting in my home office with a lukewarm coffee, staring at a Figma concept for a complex SaaS dashboard. Usually, one spends a few sprints to polish the experience, reaching a high-fidelity mockup, and then ships it to engineering. Instead, I opened up an AI tool and whispered a few prompts. An hour later? I wasn’t looking at a concept. I was looking at a functioning product. Not a mockup. Not a prototype. A living, breathing, code-heavy product. It’s like magic. It’s a miracle. And it looks like absolute generic shit.

Enter Cursor.

Well, okay, maybe not “shit” in the technical sense. It’s clean. It’s functional. It’s… fine. It’s that ultra-sanitized, white-space-heavy, “I have no soul, but my margins are perfect” aesthetic that has taken over the internet – the kind of browser breakpoints that will make a guy blush. It comes with the same awful, generic emoji library we’ve all seen a thousand times, but don’t worry I can feed it whatever icon library I want, and it’ll use that one. Kinda.

So here’s the kicker: I can build just about anything in Cursor in minutes, or even a day, ship it to engineering to plug into a database, and call it a day. Or maybe I do all that myself, I mean… I could.

So… should I?

The 4% Problem

I’ve always said that design best practices (you know the stuff we’ve spent 10+ years refining) like Material Design or Apple’s heavily “borrowed” UX patterns make up about 96% of the experience. It’s the foundational “don’t make me think” layer. The other 4%? That’s the soul. That’s the differentiation, the brand identity, the “why do I actually like being here?” factor.

AI has officially mastered the 96%. It can mimic Apple’s heavily researched patterns in three seconds, or any other company for that matter. It can swallow a brand guide and a few Figma files and spit out a design system that is technically “correct” but feels like it was designed by a committee of robots who have never actually felt joy.

But as an industry, we’re collectively looking at this and saying, “Yeah, but it’s AI, and we are saving so much time!” It makes us faster. Yes. It gives us superpowers. Oh yes. Does it remove the “craft” from the craftsman? Yes. It tries really hard… but it fails.

And it’s not just the pixels… it’s the words, too. Why hire a copywriter to agonize over headlines and webcopy for hours (or days) when I can ask a LLM to give me fifty variations of <insert catchy title> in three seconds? I’m essentially Frankenstein-ing a digital existence: a design aesthetic pooled from Pinterest, UX patterns stolen from Fortune 500 R&D budgets, and copy “inspired” by the top 1% of the internet’s high-converting landing pages. So… if I can build a $200,000 product in an hour, one that would normally take ten people six months of sweat and Slack pings, using the collective intelligence of everyone who came before me, can I actually charge $200,000 for it? Or am I just the same guy with a shovel, shouting orders at a fleet of stolen front-loaders and hoping nobody asks to see my work? I’m being slightly dramatic, but you get the point…

Feeding the Monster

Insert Terminator “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun” music here.

Even as autonomous as Cursor is, it still needs a handler. It needs someone to monitor the thing, to feed the AI monster and keep it happy so it doesn’t get bored and start hallucinating copy, buttons, panels, icons, and robots to hunt down Sara Connor… 

Our company leaders are already ahead of us. They’re creating OKRs around AI spend, removing “extraneous” roles (rest in peace junior-level roles and project managers), and adding firepower to department leads whether they want it or not. It’s an “opt-in or get left behind” world. And I’m not being dramatic. Why would any organization not utilize this? It turns a six-month build into a two-week sprint.

AI is fucking amazing, but man, is it disruptive.

The Great QA Meltdown

The big issue I’m seeing right now isn’t the AI itself… I actually think the tech is amazing. The issue is human repercussions. Organizations are forcing AI into every single workflow without understanding the downstream carnage.

The Speed Trap: Employees can’t keep up with the demand of “random tasks” generated at the speed of light.

The Engineering Burial: Dev teams are being buried under a mountain of “shippable” code that hasn’t been properly architected because an AI spat it out in a vacuum.

The Death of QA: Properly testing a site before it launches? Forget it. “We need it live now, we’ll fix it later” has become the mantra because the build only took an hour, so why should the testing take a week? I mean… I can tell you why.

The PM Ghost Town: “We don’t need project managers anymore! The AI handles the tickets!” Morgan Freeman’s narrator voice: The AI did not, in fact, handle the tickets.

Welcome to Skynet, Bitches

I’m not an AI hater. In two years, I’ll probably look back at this post and laugh at how “magical and disruptive” I thought it all was, while I complain that my AI-integrated brain-chip is lagging. The cycle of feeding the beast will continue.

But right now, we’re in the messy middle. But I want to make one thing very clear. It’s not easy to be the one steering the ship toward a massive, glowing singularity. It takes a specific kind of balls to dismantle traditional workflows in real-time while the competition is breathing down your neck. My hat is off to you. These are the people taking the risk, gambling on the future, and making the hard calls. They are giving their employees superpowers, even if those employees are currently vibrating with anxiety.

If you aren’t using AI in your workflow, your competition certainly fucking is. They’re building that scribble on the whiteboard while you’re still picking out a color palette. They’re shipping the generic, emoji-laden, “good enough” product while you’re still arguing about the user journey.

Look, it’s easy to be the “sky is falling” guy when your twenty years of pixel-pushing is being replaced by a Chatbot. But let’s look at the bright side… we’ve officially automated the boring stuff. No more red lines, no more responsive documentation. I’m ok with that. We have finally achieved the dream of being able to build a tech empire from our couches while wearing the same hoodie for three weeks straight. Wait, is that a dream, or is AI feeding us this narrative? Oh dear.

Let’s wrap with some takeaways to feed the soul a bit, shall we?

In a world of infinite templates, “weird” is a competitive advantage. Save your energy for the brand flourishes, the custom micro-interactions, and the copy that actually sounds like a human wrote it. Stop trying to out-design the AI at the 96% stuff. Just because you can ship it in an hour doesn’t mean you should skip the “Does this actually solve a human problem?” check. Use the time you saved to actually talk to your users. The competition is using it, pretty much all you need to know.

It’s efficient. It’s fast. It’s maddening. It’s the future.

I’m going to go feed the monster now. It’s looking hungry.