a few years ago, if you wanted to explore ten ideas, you probably explored three.
time was the constraint.
now i can generate more concepts, screens, copy variations, and prototypes in a day than i could have a few years ago.
which sounds great.
and mostly is.
but something interesting happened.
execution stopped being the bottleneck.
judgment became the bottleneck.
because when there are fifty possible directions, choosing the right one becomes harder than producing them.
i see this in design all the time now.
the question isn't:
“can we make this?”
“should we make this?”
“is this actually better?”
“what problem are we solving in the first place?”
ai has made creating dramatically easier.
it hasn't made choosing easier.
if anything, it's made it more important.
the people i know getting the most value from ai aren't necessarily the fastest.
they're usually the ones with the clearest point of view.
turns out taste still doesn't have a shortcut.