What happens when "decent design" is the default

Happy Saturday.

I just got back from filming with teams at Vercel and Metalab.

Both navigating the same thing: the workflow underneath changes sprint by sprint, but the craft standards, the identity of the team, and the thing that makes their work theirs, has to survive the transition.

Sara Vienna at Metalab put it simply: as long as humans vote with time, money, and attention in digital products, design still has room to be the hero.

Here are two conversations this week made me rethink what "great designer" actually means right now.

– Tommy (@designertom)

TOGETHER WITH DSCOUT

Vivid Seats had the same problem every product team has: research couldn't keep up with the build cycle.

So designers started running their own sessions. Developers heard from users directly. They recruited participants through Dscout in 24 hours and got usable insights inside a single sprint.

The research actually landed because the people building the product were the ones running it.

Read the Vivid Seats case study →

What becomes valuable when everyone can make decent things quickly

Ben Blumenrose runs Designer Fund.

He's been investing in design-led companies for over a decade, and right now he has a front-row seat across his entire portfolio to how teams are absorbing AI into real workflows.

His observation: the floor of what any individual can produce just rose dramatically. When decent output is fast and cheap, decent stops being the differentiator. It becomes the baseline.

Ben’s definition of “AI fluency” is my all-time favorite.

He says it’s not knowing which tools to use, but knowing what to do with "I wonder if." The new literacy is your instinct to ask the next question, pick the right fidelity, and know when to stop.

Watch the full conversation →

The T-shaped designer is getting wider and deeper.

AI acts as a permanent mentor. It’s an expert on tap for domains you'd normally need a specialist for.

Ben's seeing companies hire "AI Design Ops" as early as the fourth hire, because one person in that seat can double the output of the team.

Meanwhile, prototype URLs are scattered across Slack, Looms, docs, Cursor sessions. The tools got faster but the infrastructure around them is lagging behind.

Josh Puckett lands on the same thesis from a different angle.

His framework: you stand out through uncommon effort or uncommon taste. Preferably both.

He brought up the Stripe Press book cover. Sixty to seventy iterations by world-class designers who could have stopped at five. The gap between five and sixty is where craft lives.

Josh says "AI native" is the new "mobile designer." A moment, not an identity. Tools change, but principles don't.

Designers are the least happy function with AI right now.

Josh's theory: design historically carried the least responsibility in the eng-product-design triangle. Now designers are experiencing breakage, scope collapse, system failures for the first time.

That's it for this week.

Ben's keeping his kids (six and four) mostly away from AI right now and opting for paper towel roll imagination. Person-to-person communication. Build the instincts before the amplifiers.

Maybe that's the actual answer. The tools are extraordinary. The question is whether you know how to build something worth amplifying.

See you next week,

Tommy