"I never decided to go all in on AI, it just kept showing up. At first, in small, practical ways. Generating content for design mocks or writing simple scripts to automate boring tasks. I even built a Figma plugin to easily rename all the icons in our icon library, to avoid the repetitive work, but also because I was curious if I could make it work. One thing led to another. I started playing around and started finding excuses to explore."
"I stopped defaulting to Google search and started relying more on Perplexity, and other similar tools. On paper, it's an obvious upgrade. Direct answers, cleaner summaries, fewer tabs open, and much less noise. But something subtle disappeared in the process. No more random blog posts from 2010, fewer half-relevant Reddit rabbit holes. Almost nothing that pulled me somewhere unexpected. I stopped wandering, I started extracting."
"Super efficient, but over time, that efficiency started to shape how I thought. I was moving faster towards answers, but along narrower paths. Ideas felt more predictable, and I was less surprised by where I ended up. The work converged quickly, sometimes too quickly. Design almost never benefits from straight lines. Some ideas only show up when you take the long way around, when you don't quite know what you're looking for yet."
AI gradually became central to the workflow through small automations and creative experiments, such as a Figma plugin to rename icons, an iOS exercise app, and tools for quick design brainstorming. Experimentation escalated into shipping production PRs and joining a team focused on AI tooling. Search habits shifted from Google to Perplexity and similar tools, yielding direct answers, cleaner summaries, and less noise. That efficiency reduced exposure to unexpected sources like old blog posts or Reddit threads, shrinking exploratory wandering. Thinking narrowed, ideas converged faster, and creative work risked becoming predictable. Design often requires detours, dead ends, and surprises that rapid extraction can eliminate.
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