The things we leave behind

AI isn’t here to replace designers; it’s here to clear the clutter.

In my work as a design leader, AI has become a creative co-pilot. It helps me move fast on the parts anyone could do, so I can focus on the parts only I should do.

Is your design backlog a graveyard of amazing ideas that never see the light of day because you didn’t have time to flesh them out? So many good bones, so little. Yeah, same.

In agile environments, we have to fight to spend time on the things that elevate good design to great. We race through flows, squash bugs, ship features, but the nuance, the elegance? Those often end up in the “nice to have” pile. And that pile becomes a permanent graveyard. RIP, delightful moments.

AI is changing this.

Crafting the rhythm of feeling in a user journey, the tension and release, the pauses that give weight to a moment, It’s what makes a product feel alive, not just functional. This is why we got into design, isn't it?

Take wireframes. Tools like UXPilot, Galileo AI, and Genius for Figma can generate rough but usable designs from a few lines of input. It’s not final, but it’s functional. That’s the 80%. It gets us moving.

• The 20% that’s left? That’s where the craft lives:

• How do we make this feel human?

• What friction is helpful, and what’s just annoying?

• Where can we break a pattern to add delight or clarity?

• What’s the emotional cadence of this experience?

The Stack That’s Actually Making a Difference

There are a million AI tools out there, and half of them promise to “revolutionize your workflow.” Most won’t. But a few are actually shifting how I design, build, and research in real time.

Here’s what’s earned a permanent spot in my toolkit:

• UXPilot – Think of it as a strategist in your pocket. Helps draft UX flows, spot edge cases, and even nudge you on accessibility. It doesn’t just draw boxes—it thinks through the logic.

• Galileo AI – Turns prompts into UI and hands you clean React components. Surprisingly solid visual output when you need a fast starting point.

• Genius (Figma plugin) – Lives inside Figma and helps with auto-layout, microcopy, and even dev-friendly suggestions. It’s like having a senior designer quietly working next to you.

• Vercel v0 – Natural language to real, usable HTML/CSS/React, mapped to your own design tokens. Great for eliminating that endless “what if” back-and-forth with engineering.

• Claude 3.5 / ChatGPT-4o – My go-to for trained AI that actually understands tone, product philosophy, and component logic. It writes copy, critiques flows, synthesizes research, and can spot your own blind spots if you let it.

Grain.io – Total game-changer for research. I use it to record user interviews, tag highlights in real time, and quickly assemble insight reels. Then Claude helps me spot patterns across interviews. Suddenly, research is something I look forward to—because it’s fast, rich, and connected directly to design decisions.

These tools don’t replace the work—they remove the overhead. So I can get to the actual design thinking faster, and stay there longer.