Design still worth it now

AI can now produce a passable landing page in under a minute. So a fair question keeps landing in my inbox: is design still worth paying for? My honest answer is that the value never lived in the pixels. It lived in the decisions behind them.

A generated screen answers "what could this look like." It cannot answer "what should we not build," "what will confuse a first-time user on a bad day," or "which of these five flows matches how your customers actually think." Those answers come from judgment, and judgment comes from humans who have watched real people struggle with real products.

The bar moved, the job did not

What changed is the floor. Average design is now free, which means average design is now invisible. The only work worth paying for is work that is deliberate: opinionated structure, ruthless clarity, and details that make a product feel inevitable instead of assembled.

I use AI in almost every project, and it has made me faster at the parts that were never the point. The parts that were the point, understanding people and making calls, are worth more than ever, because now they are the only differentiator left.