Let me start with the part I actually mean: I've fully bought in.
I design in code now. I describe an interaction, get something real back, and test it as an actual interface in an afternoon instead of two weeks. Ideas that used to die because I never found the time to build them now just get to exist. I can make ten versions of a flow and throw nine away without feeling bad about the lost hours, because there were no lost hours. This is better. It just is.
I'm not going to pretend I miss the old way just to sound like a Real Artist. The work is faster, I can try more things, and I get to spend my attention on the questions that actually matter. Is this the right thing to build? Does it make sense to the person using it? Is it honest? Instead of spending it on the mechanics of putting it together.
So this isn't a sad post. It's more of a note to myself. Because somewhere in all that speed, one specific thing I love is quietly going away, and I'd rather notice it now than realize later that I let it go without looking.
Here's what I'll miss: pushing pixels. The actual, literal act of it.
Nudging a component one pixel to the left, then one pixel back, because the first spot was wrong in a way I couldn't explain but could feel. Holding down the arrow key and watching a shape slide into place. Fixing the spacing on a label until it stopped bugging me. Redrawing a corner four times until it finally looked right. None of it was efficient. Most of it, nobody else ever noticed. And it was some of the calmest, happiest work I've ever done.
Because pushing pixels was never just about the result. It was a practice. It put me in a specific state, where the hours disappear and the noise goes quiet and my whole brain shrinks down to the half-millimeter that's off. It felt truly meditative. My attention got so focused there was no room left for worrying. The task was small, it had an end to it, and it was completely in my control. Giving myself to it all the way was a kind of rest.
If that sounds familiar to anyone who's seen my paintings, good. It's the same thing.
My work, the hard-edge geometric stuff, the flat bright colors, the pieces I think of as composed mischief, lives or dies on precision. A clean edge. A color sitting exactly where it belongs and nowhere else. The mischief only works because the making is so careful. If it were sloppy it would just look sloppy. And painting does to me exactly what pushing pixels did. It drops me into that focused, quiet, calm place where I'm just aligning one thing up until it's right, then the next, then the next. The care is the meditation. That's not a side effect of how I work. It might be the whole point of how I work.
So here's the honest tension. AI takes the part of design I would have called boring three years ago, the assembling, the nudging, the fiddly manual stuff, and it does it faster and often better than I would. That's a gift. It's also the exact part that quiets my mind. The boring part was doing something for me that I didn't fully notice until it started to disappear.
I don't think the answer is to refuse the tools to feel more artsy. That's just a slower way to make worse work, and I have no interest in being dramatic about it. But I do want to ask where the calm goes when the manual work leaves.
Some of it moves somewhere else, and honestly somewhere higher up. The craft doesn't disappear, it just changes jobs. Now the hard part is the judgment. Which of the ten versions is actually the right one, and being able to feel the difference. Where the taste lives when it's not coming out one pixel at a time. That's a harder kind of focus, and less soothing, and I'm still learning to find the same quiet inside it.
And some of it, the part that was never really about design at all, the part that was just about my hands and my attention and the plain pleasure of making a small thing exactly right, well, I'm lucky. I know exactly where that lives. It lives on the canvas on my easel, where no model is going to nudge the edge for me.
Maybe that's the small lesson in all of this. Let the tools take the work that was only ever work. But notice which of your boring parts was secretly your peace, and go keep that part on purpose, somewhere they can't reach it.
For me, it's paint. What is it for you?