Everyone has the same AI tools. That's exactly why craft matters more

You prompt an AI tool for a landing page. It looks great. Modern. Clean. Professional.

You prompt it again next month for a new feature page. Also looks great. Completely different visual language.

You try to generate marketing assets that match your product. The AI gives you four options. None of them quite feel like you, but you're not sure why.

This is the black box problem. And it's quietly destroying brand coherence across the industry.

The repeatability crisis

Here's what most founders don't realize about AI design tools: the output isn't repeatable.

You get a result. You like it. But you don't know how you got there. The prompt that worked today won't work exactly the same tomorrow. The model that generated your brand concept last month has been updated. The randomness is baked in.

Your competitor can generate the same "modern, professional landing page" in ten minutes. So can the startup down the street. So can every company in your space. If your brand can be replicated by anyone with a credit card and a ChatGPT subscription, you don't have a brand. You have a template with your logo on it.

I've been building digital products for twenty-two years. Brand has always been about consistency—making a thousand decisions that compound into something recognizable, something customers can trust and remember.

AI can't do that. Not because the technology is bad, but because consistency requires reasons. It requires knowing why you chose that color, that spacing, that interaction pattern. It requires being able to make the same decision next month and next year.

AI doesn't have reasons. It has outputs. And outputs without reasons can't build brands.

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AI doesn't have reasons. It has outputs. And outputs without reasons can't build brands.

What the models learned

There's a deeper problem with AI-generated design that nobody talks about: the training data.

These models learned from the last decade of design. Every "clean, modern SaaS interface." Every "trustworthy fintech brand." Every design trend that defined the 2010s.

When you prompt for professional design, you get the average of everything professional that came before. You get the status quo, perfectly rendered. The mean. The expected.

That's fine for baseline quality. It's catastrophic for differentiation.

The tools changed. The game didn't.

I started my first design company in 2003 at eighteen year old. Several businesses later (design studios & products) — I've seen every "this changes everything" moment the industry has produced.

Flash was going to change everything. It did... then Steve Jobs killed it by not putting it on iPhones. Websites were fixed-width... until responsive design rewrote the rules. UX became a discipline that didn't exist when I started. Smartphones rewrote all the rules. No-code tools democratized building. Every wave brought predictions that design was dying.

Design didn't die. It evolved. The designers who thrived understood the difference between what tools could do and what clients actually needed.

AI is just the latest wave. The fastest one. The most disorienting one. Everything we know today wasn't true six months ago. Everything we're doing today won't work in six months time.

But the same truth holds: tools enable craft. They don't replace it. Tools execute. Craft decides what to execute and why.

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Tools execute. Craft decides what to execute and why.

The craft that AI can't replicate

Let me be direct: I'm not anti-AI. My studio uses AI tools every day. They've transformed what's possible. It speeds up some work tremendeously and unlocks new kinds of tasks we won't normally take on, producing a better end result for clients.

But I've learned where they work and where they don't.

AI excels at divergent thinking. Brainstorming. Generating lots of options quickly. It's a phenomenal sparring partner for the expansive, exploratory phase of creative work.

Craft happens in the convergent phase. Choosing which option serves the brand. Understanding why this direction works and that one doesn't. Making intentional decisions that compound over time into something coherent and distinctive.

That's not a prompt. That's judgment. And judgment comes from understanding your users, your market, your business goals—context that no model has.

On a recent project, we built a sophisticated user profile system straight from concept to code. No wireframes. No traditional design phase. AI helped us move faster than ever before.

But every decision was still intentional. We knew why we chose each interaction pattern. We could repeat those choices consistently. We could explain the reasoning to the client.

The craft wasn't in the files we produced. It was in the thinking that guided the production. AI accelerated the execution. It couldn't replace the judgment.

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When baseline quality is free, differentiation becomes rare.

The question that reveals everything

Here's the test I give every founder:

Take your logo off your product. Take it off your website, your app, your marketing.

Does it still feel like you? Would a customer recognize your brand from the experience alone? Does it feel meaningfully different from your competitors?

If you're not sure, or if the answer is no, you don't have a tools problem. You have a craft problem.

And more AI tools won't solve it. If anything, they'll make it worse. Because every time you prompt for "professional" or "modern" or "clean," you're pulling toward the average. You're blending in faster.

Standing out requires going beyond what the models know. It requires human judgment about what's right for your brand, your users, your moment in the market.

The craft premium

Here's the counterintuitive reality: AI hasn't made premium design less valuable. It's made it more valuable.

When baseline quality is free, differentiation becomes rare. When everyone can generate "good enough," exceptional stands out more than ever. The gap between commodity and craft isn't closing—it's widening.

The companies that will win the next decade aren't the ones that adopt AI tools fastest. Everyone will adopt them. The winners will be the ones who use AI to enhance their craft rather than outsource their judgment.

The question isn't whether to use AI. You will. Everyone will.

The question is whether you'll use it as a black box that commoditizes your brand, or as a catalyst that amplifies the craft you actually have.

One path leads to faster mediocrity. The other leads to brands that customers remember.

After twenty-two years, I know which one wins.