Every major design tool has shipped an AI feature in the last twelve months. Figma Make. Framer AI. V0. Galileo. Diagram. Lovable. The marketing pages look interchangeable. So do the demo videos.
People keep calling this progress. I think it's evidence the tools are all solving the same wrong problem.
What they're solving is execution speed. How fast can a person who knows what they want translate it into something usable. That's a real bottleneck for some kinds of work: internal tools, MVPs, marketing pages, the line work of UI. Compressing it is genuinely useful. But it's also the axis every tool is converging on, which means the moat is shrinking, not deepening.
The principle from Irvan's foundation that lights this up: Taste compounds. Tools commoditize. The half-life of a design tool is about three years. The half-life of taste is decades. Right now every design team is racing on the wrong axis. Who can adopt the new tool fastest. Who can produce the most variants in a day. By the time a team has figured out its AI workflows, the differentiation is gone, because the next team three months behind it has the same workflows.
The moat moves up. Strategic framing, problem selection, having opinions about what the product is actually for. None of which the current generation of tools touches. None of which AI is going to commoditize in the next five years, because none of it has well-defined success criteria the way "render a working prototype" does.
The question for designers right now isn't "which AI tool should we use." It's: what work am I doing that I'd be embarrassed to have an LLM expose as undifferentiated. If the answer is most of your day, the problem isn't AI. The problem was there before AI. AI is just making it visible.
This split also predicts which design careers survive the next decade. Designers whose calling card is "I'm fast in Figma" are competing with the new tools, and they'll lose. Designers whose calling card is "I sit in the room where the strategy gets made and I shape what we build" are using the new tools to ship faster, and they're benefiting.
The convergence we're watching is the floor rising. That's good for the field. It's bad news only for people who built their career on being marginally above the floor.
The current AI tool wave doesn't produce winners and losers among tools. It produces winners and losers among designers, sorted by how much of their value lived above the line of execution.
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