AI won't replace designers because it lacks taste and subjective opinion. Instead, as AI gets better at generating highly opinionated (though not perfect) designs, it will serve as a powerful exploration tool. This plants more flags in the option space, allowing human designers to react, curate, and push the most promising directions further, amplifying their strategic role.

As AI makes it easy to generate 'good enough' software, a functional product is no longer a moat. The new advantage is creating an experience so delightful that users prefer it over a custom-built alternative. This makes design the primary driver of value, setting premium software apart from the infinitely generated.

As AI makes software creation faster and cheaper, the market will flood with products. In this environment of abundance, a strong brand, point of view, taste, and high-quality design become the most critical factors for a product to stand out and win customers.

Even powerful AI tools don't produce a final, polished product. This "last mile" problem creates an opportunity for humans who master AI tools and then refine, integrate, and complete the work. These "finisher" roles are indispensable as there is no single AI solution to rule them all.

While professional engineers focus on craft and quality, the average user is satisfied if an AI tool produces a functional result, regardless of its underlying elegance or efficiency. This tendency to accept "good enough" output threatens to devalue the meticulous work of skilled developers.

As AI makes it incredibly easy to build products, the market will be flooded with options. The critical, differentiating skill will no longer be technical execution but human judgment: deciding *what* should exist, which features matter, and the right distribution strategy. Synthesizing these elements is where future value lies.

The era of winning with merely functional software is over. As technology, especially AI, makes baseline functionality easier to build, the key differentiator becomes design excellence and superior craft. Mediocre, 'good enough' products will lose to those that are exceptionally well-designed.

AI coding tools generate functional but often generic designs. The key to creating a beautiful, personalized application is for the human to act as a creative director. This involves rejecting default outputs, finding specific aesthetic inspirations, and guiding the AI to implement a curated human vision.

AI tools can drastically increase the volume of initial creative explorations, moving from 3 directions to 10 or more. The designer's role then shifts from pure creation to expert curation, using their taste to edit AI outputs into winning concepts.