There is a particular kind of sadness that comes from opening a product you once loved and realising it has been slopified.
I experienced this recently with 22seven a product I genuinely loved. Clean, considered, and clearly built by people who cared about the person using it. Then it became Vault 22. And something left with the old name. The edges got rougher. The flows felt stitched together rather than considered. The copy read like it was prompted, not written. Somewhere between the product I remembered and the one in front of me, a human stopped caring or more likely, was replaced by a process that never cared at all.
I do not think 22seven is alone. I think it is just one of the more personal examples of something happening everywhere, all at once.
We are living through what I can only describe as the great enshittification of craft. And I say that as someone who has spent years as a designer someone who genuinely loves the process of making things work beautifully, not just making things ship quickly.
This is not a post about hating AI. I use it. I think it is genuinely powerful when it is used well. But there is a version of “used well” that almost nobody is talking about honestly, and the gap between that version and what is actually happening out there is getting harder to ignore.
AI didn’t just lower the barrier to building. It lowered the bar for what “good enough” looks like. And a terrifying number of teams have decided that good enough is fine.
It is not fine. And the users even if they cannot say exactly why already know it.
The Vibe Coding Era Has a Design ProblemRight now, thousands of teams are “vibe coding” their way to a product. Prompting their way through interfaces. Generating screens, accepting whatever comes out, and calling it done.
Then they spend three times as long trying to unvibe their own code debugging outputs they do not fully understand, unwinding design decisions nobody actually made, and wondering why the product feels like it was assembled by someone who has heard of users but never actually met one.
Most of them are not building products. They are curating AI outputs. And there is a significant difference between those two things one that shows up immediately the moment a real human tries to use what was made.
The irony is brutal: AI was supposed to free designers and engineers to do more creative, higher-order thinking. For a lot of teams, it has done the opposite. It has replaced thinking entirely. The process is gone. The craft is gone. What remains is a loop of generate, accept, ship, regret and then generate again, hoping this time will be different.
It will not be different. Not until someone in the room decides to actually think.
Design Thinking Is the Most Undervalued Skill in the RoomHere is what most people caught up in the AI hype cycle are missing.
Design thinking — the actual practice of understanding a problem, questioning assumptions, mapping user needs, testing ideas against reality, and knowing when something is not right yet is not something AI can do for you. It is the process that determines whether the thing you are building is worth building at all.
AI is an exceptional tool for executing on a well-considered idea. It is an absolutely catastrophic tool for figuring out what the idea should be.
The teams getting this right are using AI to move faster through the execution of decisions they have already made thoughtfully. They come to the tool with clarity a point of view, a user in mind, a problem they have genuinely interrogated and use AI to accelerate the output of that thinking.
The teams getting this wrong are using AI to skip the thinking entirely. And then they spend months wondering why users do not care about what was built, cycling through features and rebrands and positioning pivots, looking for an external solution to what was always an internal process problem.
Design thinking is not slowing you down. The absence of it is what is quietly destroying products before they ever have a chance.
Great Ideas Are Dying From Bad ExecutionI have watched too many genuinely compelling product ideas fail — not because the market was wrong or the timing was off, but because the execution was a mess that no amount of funding or features could fix.
Teams so eager to ship that they skipped the part where you figure out how the product actually feels to use. Flows that made sense in a prompt but broke down the moment a real human touched them. Interfaces that looked like a design system had a disagreement with itself and nobody bothered to mediate. Onboarding experiences that assumed the user already understood what the product was for.
And the most frustrating part: the ideas were often genuinely good. The problems were real. The conviction was there. Everything needed to build something meaningful was present except the process that would have translated all of it into something people could actually use.
Good design is not decoration. It is not polish applied at the end. It is the connective tissue that holds a product experience together and makes someone want to come back. Right now, that tissue is being skipped in the name of shipping speed and the products that result feel exactly like what they are: assembled, not designed.
We Are Watching Craft Become an Endangered SpeciesNot long ago, people were proud of the time it took to become genuinely great at something. Mastery was a badge. The details mattered. You would find “made with love by the [team name] team” in a product footer and know that somewhere, a group of humans had cared deeply about every pixel, every interaction, every edge case that most users would never consciously notice but would always subconsciously feel.
Now the closest equivalent is “built with AI” — a statement that communicates something entirely different. Not love. Not care. Not craft. Speed. Volume. Throughput.
Companies that were built on strong design principles are starting to get the slopification treatment from the inside. The craft that made them worth using is being gradually replaced by outputs that are faster to generate and worse to experience. Users notice. They always notice. They just do not always have the language to describe what changed they only know that something did, and that the product feels less like something made for them and more like something made at them.
Even Google a company with some of the most talented designers and engineers in the world is now proudly declaring that most of its products and features are being built by AI. And I do not say this lightly: that makes me genuinely sad.
Not because AI is involved. Because what is being lost in that trade is human judgment. The considered decision. The designer who stared at a flow for an hour and said “this isn’t right yet” and meant it, and knew why, and fixed it. That voice is getting quieter. And the products we all use every day are becoming subtly, persistently worse because of it.
Why This Is the Best Time to Care About CraftHere is the part that most people writing about AI and design will not say.
In a world where craft is scarce, craft compounds.
If you are a junior designer or engineer entering this market, you are walking into one of the most unusual windows of opportunity in a generation. Senior designers and developers who should be mentoring craft are themselves losing the battle to AI-assisted mediocrity. The institutional knowledge of what good actually looks like the felt sense of when something is not ready yet is thinning faster than anyone wants to admit.
Which means if you show up with real design thinking if you can articulate why a decision works and not just that it was generated you stand out immediately. Not because you are the most experienced person in the room. Because you are increasingly one of the only people in the room who is actually thinking through the problem before reaching for the tool.
The slightest genuine effort is visible right now in a way it has not been in years. A product that was clearly considered where the flows make sense, the hierarchy communicates, the copy sounds like a person wrote it for another person announces itself without saying a word. It feels different. Users feel the difference even when they cannot name it.
The bar has been lowered so aggressively that clearing it with real intention looks, to the people on the other side, like excellence. That is both a tragedy for the industry and the most interesting career opportunity available to anyone who still cares about doing good work.
The Craft Advantage Is Yours to TakeFor founders, for junior designers, for engineers who still give a damn — this moment is a fork in the road.
One path follows the market signal: ship fast, use AI for everything, design later, craft is a luxury you will get to eventually. Most teams are on this path. Most products built on this path feel like it.
The other path is quieter and considerably less crowded. It is the one where you slow down just enough to actually think. Where you treat the user’s experience as something worth protecting, not just something to be generated. Where you use AI as a powerful accelerant on top of a process that was already sound rather than as a replacement for having a process at all.
The products breaking through in genuinely crowded markets right now are not winning on feature count. They are winning on feel. On trust. On the quality of attention that someone clearly paid to the person on the other side of the screen. That quality is rare enough now that users recognise it immediately even if they would just call it “I don’t know, it just feels better.”
Craft is not nostalgia. It is not resistance to progress. It is the thing that separates a product people tolerate from one they tell other people about.
Everybody else is vibing their way to mediocrity. The designers, engineers, and founders who choose craft right now are not swimming against the current they are building on ground that almost nobody else is standing on.
That ground does not get more crowded. It gets more valuable.
Stand on it.