On AI, slot machines, and forgetting how to craft pixels.
I’ve grown tired of AI lately… of what it does to me.
Every new model, every new tool, every new workflow. Yes, they’re powerful. Yes, they let us do more. But there’s this weird disconnect growing between me and the things I make. When everything is instant, it starts feeling like a slot machine. Except you always win. Which makes it more addictive. And somehow… also boring?
And you can’t stop. Social media keeps telling us to ship more, faster, be first. But when anyone has the power of a team of 10x engineers (lol), being first isn’t even a moat anymore. It’s just being slightly less late.
The worst part is what this comic is about. I catch myself using AI for things I used to enjoy doing. Changing a font size. Adjusting the border radius. Pushing pixels until the result made me proud.
I still do something similar, but now it’s a conversation. I tell the spirit in the terminal to do it for me. “Make the left padding a bit wider. Make the animation snappier. Use our subtle foreground color… don’t use any color, use our color token. Oh, and make it smaller, go from sm to xs.” That’s my new pixel-pushing.
Why? Because I can. And that’s the trap.
The thing gets done but it doesn’t feel like I did anything. I could’ve written that code myself… but sometimes I don’t even know where the component lives in the files. I’d have to inspect the element in the browser, find the classes, copy them, search them in my IDE, locate the file, then edit it (am I the only one who does this?) So instead… I just talk to the machine. I overexplain so it only changes what I want. I don’t design anymore. I direct.
But these things could direct themselves too. The “human in the loop” feels less like the guide and more like the thing slowing it all down. Some people call this slowing of the machine… this fine-tuning… “taste.” The ultimate human moat. Guys, stop it with your “taste.” I’ve seen how you dress. You don’t have any. And taste is really just doing things the way the top 10% of creators do instead of the average. That’s a pattern. Patterns are exactly what these things are built to learn… just give it time (a month?).
But hey… this comic? I tried new angles, more creative shots. All hand-drawn. No model. No worktree. No extra-high reasoning. Just me and the canvas. And that feels good. Like… “look, mom, I made this!”
Look, I’m in a rut. I really love these tools, I love creating with AI, I’ve never felt so productive. They’re wild and they’re powerful. But I hope we keep the joy. Because if everything is automated and instant but doesn’t feel like ours… what are we even making?
Extended overthinking was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.