Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

The AI wave was supposed to flatten design. For a minute, it really felt like the skills creatives spent years sharpening (taste, craft, product thinking) were about to get automated. AI could generate screens, flows, even entire products in seconds.

But instead of replacing design, AI has introduced a new set of problems that feel a lot less like automation and a lot more like judgment calls. The challenge isn’t just what AI can create. It’s how those creations behave in the real world.

Here are some tensions emerging in the intersection of AI and design right now:

We’re also designing in a new environment where AI isn’t fully reliable, and users know it. Hallucinations aren’t rare bugs; they’re part of the system. Which means designers are now responsible for shaping how people interact with something that can be both incredibly useful and occasionally incorrect.

So products are starting to introduce subtle but important cues: signals of confidence, clearer sourcing, and more editable outputs. Not to make AI perfect, but to make it understandable.

For years, UX was about speed and simplicity. Remove friction, make things intuitive, and make the user experience seamless.

Even when AI works, users hesitate and second-guess. The next wave of product design is less about polish and more about trust, helping users understand why something happened, how much they can rely on it, and what control they have over it. The best AI products won’t just feel seamless, they’ll feel honest.

Every product is starting to look identical. Clean dashboards, familiar layouts, the same components recycled across tools. Replicable design systems, public component libraries, templates, and AI-trained patterns have made it incredibly easy to build something that looks “good” fast.

But homogeneity is the tradeoff. We’ve optimized for efficiency and consistency, and in the process, stripped away some of the distinctiveness that made products sticky and memorable in the first place. It’s never been easier to ship and it’s never been harder to stand out.

We’re in a moment where execution matters less and taste matters more. When everything can be generated, the differentiator isn’t speed - it’s whether something deserves to exist in the first place. That’s a design problem AI hasn’t solved.

This shift (from execution to judgment) is becoming the most valuable layer of product design. When possibilities are infinite, the real skill is knowing what to build, what to ignore, and what to kill early.

Team Toast 🥂

Build your website and your circle 🥂

Our upcoming Toast event is officially sold out and the waitlist is open, but we wanted to give a HUGE shoutout to our sponsors for making this happen. Vercel HQ will be hosting a hands-on build night where women in tech will design and launch personal websites using Vercel’s v0. Special thanks to our partners Mobbin, plus Bloom Nutrition and Hush Hour for the goodie bags.

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