AI ate the design process. What's left is taste.

AI ate the design process

By the time you've finished your coffee, AI has already completed the warm-up exercises: user journeys, wireframes and workflows, even research synthesis. Things like the double diamond, artefacts, and the 'Sprint' method? All done for you. This is what AI executes now, faster and cheaper than any human team. If your value was in producing these artefacts, that value just got commoditised.

The process was never the value

Here's the uncomfortable truth: following steps never produced great design. The double diamond didn't create Linear. Sprint workshops didn't birth Notion Calendar. No amount of affinity mapping made anyone fall in love with a product. "Trust the process" was always incomplete advice. It suggested that rigour alone would deliver quality. It doesn't. It delivers artefacts. Now that AI can deliver those same artefacts, the advice isn't just incomplete. It's outdated.

Production is no longer the constraint

We can generate infinite screens, flows, variants, and experiments. Software ships in hours, not months. Companies like Cursor push updates daily. The feedback loop between idea and implementation has collapsed to almost nothing. This is genuinely new. For decades, production was the bottleneck. Teams existed to ship. Designers existed to help teams ship. The whole apparatus was oriented around getting things out the door. That constraint is gone.

The bottleneck moved to humans

Here's what didn't scale: attention, cognition, and decision-making. The human at the end of the process is the same human who was there before AI ate everything. Same mental bandwidth. Same capacity for choice. Same tendency to feel overwhelmed when presented with too much. Infinite options are not a gift. They're a burden. You've felt this yourself. GPT asks which of two responses you prefer. Seems reasonable. But actually comparing them, reading both carefully, weighing trade-offs, making a judgment, is a significant cognitive task. Most of the time, you just pick one and move on. Now multiply that by every product, every feature, every micro-decision in a user's day. The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's the human capacity to absorb what gets produced.

Someone has to choose before users do

If everything ships, nothing lands. When you can generate infinite variations, the question stops being "can we build this?" and becomes "should this exist?" That's a filtering problem, not a production problem. Value now comes from deciding what reaches users, not from the act of making it.

That filtering is taste

Jenny Wen, the design lead at Anthropic, puts it this way:

"In a world where anyone can make anything, what matters is your ability to choose and curate what you make." That ability to choose and curate, knowing what's worth building, what's worth pursuing, what's worth a user's attention, is taste. It's not a soft skill. It's the hard skill now.

Taste comes before skill, and creates the first gap

Ira Glass has this famous bit about creative work. People get into creative fields because they have taste. They recognise good work. That's what draws them in. But there's a gap. For the first few years, your taste exceeds your ability. You can see what good looks like, but you can't make it. This is painful. Most people quit here. The ones who push through eventually close the gap. Their skill catches up to their taste. This is the skill–taste gap: what I can make versus what I know is good.

AI narrows the skill gap

Here, AI helps. You can execute faster. Iterate more. Finish more work. See your mistakes sooner. If you use it well, AI compresses years of learning into months. The reps that once required a decade of client work can happen in a fraction of the time. AI is a time-compression engine for the painful-but-necessary "years of bad work" phase. It helps your skill catch up to your taste, if you're actively choosing, shipping, and reflecting.

But there's a second gap, and AI widens it

This one's different. The option–judgment gap: how many things can be made versus how many things a human can meaningfully evaluate. Generation scales exponentially. Judgment does not. AI can produce a hundred variations before lunch. You cannot thoughtfully evaluate a hundred variations before lunch. No one can. Choice overload increases. Deciding becomes harder, not easier. The more options that exist, the more expensive each act of judgment becomes. This is the bottleneck shift. Not skill anymore. Judgment.

Two gaps, opposite directions

AI narrows the first gap: your skill catches up to your taste faster. AI widens the second gap: more options exist than any human can evaluate. The paradox designers now live inside: it's easier than ever to make things, and harder than ever to know which things should exist. Both gaps demand taste. But they demand it differently. One to recognise quality in your own work, the other to filter quality from infinite possibilities.

Taste looks like heresy to process culture

If you've been trained in orthodox design methods, taste can feel transgressive. Jenny Wen again, on how great design actually gets made:

Starting with a solution, not a problem
Iterating for quality endlessly, long past "good enough"
Operating on intuition. Not guessing, but making reasoned judgments quickly
Skipping steps and making them up as you go
Working backwards from a vision
Doing something just to make people smile None of this fits neatly into a sprint. None of it survives a "show your research" culture. Great design routinely violates orthodox advice. That's not a bug. It's the signature of taste in action.

Designers become human proxies

Your job is no longer to generate options. AI does that. Your job is to decide on behalf of users who can't evaluate infinite ones. Think about what that means. You're a proxy, standing in for people who don't have the time, bandwidth, or expertise to sift through everything that could exist. You exercise judgment so they don't have to. Proxy for whom? Users who are already overwhelmed. Proxy doing what? Filtering the infinite down to the meaningful. This is the new job. Not production. Protection.

Skills are table stakes. Taste is the differentiator.

Execution is assumed now. Anyone with AI access can produce. What's scarce is the judgment to know what's worth producing. The conviction to ship one thing instead of ten. The instinct for what will land. Skills get you in the room. Taste is why you stay.

So develop taste deliberately

This isn't about consuming more design inspiration. Dribbble won't save you. Taste develops through committed practice: Choose. Make decisions with incomplete information. Don't defer to data when your gut has something to say. Commit. Ship the version you believe in, not the version that survives committee. Defend. Have opinions strong enough to argue for. If you can't articulate why something should exist, you haven't developed taste. You've developed preferences. Repeat. Taste sharpens through reps. Every choice you make, ship, and observe is a data point. The feedback loop is yours to accelerate. Expose yourself to great work, yes. But more importantly, practice conviction. Taste isn't just knowing good when you see it. It's having the nerve to insist on it.

The design process got eaten. Good.

It was never the point anyway. What remains is the thing that mattered all along: the human judgment to know what's worth making, and the conviction to make it well. That's taste. And it's more valuable now than ever.