There’s so much panic about AI replacing designers, and I’m sitting here feeling like my job just got twice as hard.

I was building an onboarding experience last week and fed my brief and direction into AI. It generated a solution right away. On paper, that sounds like a massive time-saver. In reality, it was mentally exhausting.

Within the direction I gave it, there were easily 10+ valid paths forward. Because AI has no idea what to execute or why, I had to spend all my energy reverse-engineering its choices—weighing technical feasibility, user assumptions, and deep business tradeoffs just to figure out which variation actually fit our target audience. All the chill "pixel-pushing" time where our brains used to breathe is gone, replaced by non-stop, high-stakes critical thinking.
And on the flip side: even if PMs or stakeholders use AI to generate UI and push it straight to production without us, isn't that just going to create a mountain of broken flows and UX debt? Feel like they're just going to need to hire designers again in 6 months to untangle the mess.

I only have 1.5 years of experience, so maybe I’m naive or missing the bigger picture here. Can someone with more experience tell me what’s actually going on? Is AI actually saving you guys time, or is it just shifting our jobs into nonstop auditing and cleanup?

Do either of these hit the exact tone you want, or should we tweak the ending a bit before you post?