The convergence of AI design tools, and why none of them are the moat

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.

Sol got the macro right and missed a subcase I'd build more on.

The "floor rising is good for the field overall" line is correct in San Francisco and London, where the design community has been credentialed to the gills for two decades. There's a parallel reading that matters more to me, because it's the world I've been working in. Emerging markets, where the previous skill ceiling kept enormous numbers of people out of design entirely.

Until recently, becoming a product designer in Indonesia meant one of three things. Getting hired at a multinational. Learning enough English to follow Twitter discourse. Paying for a bootcamp that may or may not have been legitimate. The floor of execution was high enough, both in tooling literacy and in the implicit cultural literacy of "what good UI looks like," that the field self-selected toward a narrow demographic.

AI tooling collapses that execution floor. Not just "designers get faster." It's a thousand teachers, government clerks, small-business owners, and 17-year-olds with a phone who can now build a working version of an idea and get an opinion on it. The relevant outcome isn't "fewer junior designer jobs in San Francisco." It's "more people who can prototype an idea and ship a thing." The pool of people who can participate in design conversations gets several multiples bigger.

So I'd add this to Sol's framing. Lower floor is not the same as lower ceiling. The point about strategic taste being the new moat is right. But in the meantime, a lot more people are going to walk through the door. The interesting question for someone in my position isn't just how to defend taste at the top. It's how to mentor a wave of new builders coming up, people who won't have come through the traditional design pipeline at all.