I want a mute button. Not for people. Just for one very specific type of post.

You know the one. It starts with a job title and ends with a death sentence. “Designers are cooked.” Sometimes it is marketing guys. Sometimes it is developers. The subject changes every few weeks. The panic never does. At this point, it is its own content genre.

You know it is bait. I know it is bait. But knowing something is bait and actually not flinching at it are two different things. It still gets in. Slips past your eyes, settles in the back of your head, and quietly does its job.

Fear travels faster than nuance. Outrage is a lot cheaper to produce than a genuinely good take.

Until someone builds that filter, writing about it is the next best thing.

Google stitch looks like design

I have not used Google Stitch myself. I want to be honest about that. But I have spent real time studying what it produces, and that is enough to share a perspective.

When I look at the outputs, I do not see design. I see speed. Those are not the same thing.

The outputs are clean. Symmetrical. Competent. Every element sitting exactly where you would expect it. No tension. No surprise. No real decision about what to emphasise and what to let breathe.

It looks like design the same way a stock photo looks like a real moment. Technically correct. Spiritually absent.

Fast and good are not synonyms. They never were. Right now, fast is winning the marketing war. Good is still winning the actual work.

What AI has mostly delivered is a powerful new set of visual production tools. Genuinely useful for certain things. But easy to overuse. Because we all have access to the exact same set of them now, the outputs are starting to look identical. Polished on the surface, hollow underneath.

The real creative challenge has not moved an inch: figuring out what to make, why it matters, and how to make it feel genuinely new. That part is still stubbornly human.

A tool cannot give you tast

A better tool does not transfer taste. It amplifies whatever you already have.

Give a skilled designer a faster brush and they make better work, faster. Give someone with no sense of composition that same brush and they just make bad work more quickly. The gap does not shrink. It becomes more visible.

People new to design do not yet know what they do not know. That is not a dig at anyone. It is just how learning works.

A non-designer using Stitch will generate a screen and think: that looks good. And it does, in the same way a sentence with correct grammar but no point of view looks good. Readable. Inoffensive. Forgettable.

The problem is not that they made something bad. It is that they have no way of knowing what good actually feels like yet. That gap does not close just because the tool got better.

I still get messages from friends asking me to design a website. These are people with access to every AI tool out there. They tried, got something, looked at it, and messaged me anyway. Not because I am faster. Because they could tell, even without being able to explain why, that what they made did not feel right.

That instinct is exactly what takes years to build. No app subscription can shortcut it.

Remember when Canva launched and everyone called it the death of graphic design? It was not. It made the value of real designers clearer, because suddenly the comparison was right there in public. It created a whole generation of people who tried to design something themselves, could not make it feel right, and finally understood why they needed to hire someone.

Stitch will do exactly the same thing for UX.

No chef has ever gone out of business because supermarkets sell instant noodles. If anything, instant noodles made people more aware of what real food actually tastes like. People try the quick version, realise what it is, and eventually want the real thing. One feeds you. The other feeds you well.

Here is what the noise is drowning out.

At the level where quality actually matters, where a brand needs to earn trust and hold attention, good design is still the hardest part of the process. It is also still the hardest talent to hire for. AI has not changed that. It has just added a lot of impressive-looking shortcuts that mostly reveal, on closer inspection, that they went nowhere in particular.

A tool can generate what a brand looks like on paper. It cannot generate what a brand actually feels like in the world. That is a different kind of knowledge entirely.

Those posts are not really about design. They are about engagement. A confident, measured take on where the industry is headed gets twelve likes. A catastrophic prediction gets twelve thousand. The incentive is obvious. The posts keep coming because they work, not because they are true.

Designers are not cooked. The discourse around it, on the other hand, is well done.

None of which means AI is not worth your attention. It absolutely is.

Using a generated output as a rough starting point, a quick way to explore a direction before committing real time to it, is smart and practical. Mistaking that output for finished work is where things go wrong.

The work is still the work. The judgment is still yours. And taste, real taste, is still the thing that takes the longest to build and the hardest thing to fake.

No tool has shipped a fix for that yet.

Did this land? Hit reply and let me know. And if you know a designer who needs to hear this, pass it on.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​