A Conversation on Design in the Nascent Era of Intelligent Products.

Most of what gets written about AI and design falls into one of two camps. Either design is dead and designers should retrain, or design has never mattered more and AI is going to be great for everyone. Both positions are easy to hold and hard to act on.

On a Friday evening in February, thirteen designers, creative directors, and product leaders sat around a long table at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco for the first edition of Frontier Dialogues — an invitation-only dinner we organized to explore what is happening to design and the way in which we should deal with the changing technology landscape.

The guests came from Bumble, Google, Meta, Monarch Money, Crimson, and others. Some had been designing for the web since before design systems existed. Others are building AI-native products right now. There were no slides, no panels, and nobody had prepared talking points.

Over several hours and some glasses of wine, the conversation went somewhere more interesting than either of those two extremes. A sign that maybe the answer is not in these easy extremes but in the messy and sometimes fascinating middle.

People disagreed with each other. They changed their minds mid-sentence. They got excited and then immediately undercut their own excitement. It was beautiful to watch — curious minds engaging with the topic together. What came out of it was a set of tensions, real ones, the kind that don’t resolve neatly but that anyone making products right now will recognize.

We wrote this piece to share the discussion with you and others in the industry. It tries to capture those tensions honestly. Each chapter covers one. You can read them in sequence or jump to whichever one captures your attention more sharply. Let us get to it.

The evening opened with a question about first principles. Part of why we wanted to have this dinner was a frustration with how the design profession had calcified. The people who figured out web design by doing it — instinctively, vocationally — kept evolving. But the things they wrote down along the way got treated as gospel by the next generation. Boot camps turned process into dogma. Design went from being an evolving form of critical thinking to a set of steps you follow to produce a thing.

That is knowing what to do. The harder question is what was underneath the dogma in the first place.

“What a designer does, if I go first principles,” Pablo Marques said, “is unlock computing power. A computer is capable of doing many different things, but you need someone who can instruct that computer to do that.”

The whole apparatus of product design — wireframes, flows, systems, patterns, states — all of it exists because users couldn’t just tell a computer what they wanted. The designer stood in the middle, translating.

And now that middle is compressing. “Computers are starting to be able to understand intent,” Pablo continued. “You can communicate in a more human way. So you don’t need programming or anything like that to get some of that computing power.”

He traced the idea back to a talk he’d attended by Stephen Wolfram around 2010, where Wolfram described his ambition for Mathematica: letting people code a computer just by speaking naturally. “I think, in a way, LLMs are doing what he wanted to do. To a certain extent. But then how does that change what we do?”

Nobody at the table treated this as theoretical. Several people were already working in environments where the answer, the navigation, the menus were being bypassed outright. Conner Drew described the endpoint bluntly: “Siri, add toilet paper to the shopping list. I get a delivery once a week. Zero UI. Zero anything. That’s where we’re heading.”

Nobody mourned this. The translation layer that designers built and maintained for decades is being compressed and, in some cases, disappearing entirely. The question the rest of the evening tried to answer was: what does the designer’s job become once the thing that defined it is no longer needed in the same way?

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If the last chapter was about what’s disappearing, this one was about what gets lost in the process. One metaphor kept coming back through the night: the map. Planning a route on paper requires real cognitive work — understanding the terrain, remembering the turns, building a mental model. Then a single magic blue dot collapsed all of that into something effortless, and the spatial understanding never forms.

Most of traditional product design has been about the process: flows, states, transitions, error handling, progressive disclosure. When generation collapses all of that, the interesting design problems migrate to the other side of the interaction — what the user encounters on arrival, rather than the steps taken to get there.

That “pretend layer” — the prototype, the mock-up, the spec — has always served a double purpose. It communicates ideas, but it also forces you to think. Removing the step speeds things up, but it can also strip out the slow reasoning that produces the best work.

Speed and understanding are different things, and for most of design’s history they were bundled together. Now they are being unbundled. The new skill is knowing which tool to reach for, and when to deliberately slow down.

Peter Markatos made the evening’s sharpest prediction. “You’ll be able to make a product just from a prompt. We’re probably a year or two away. And they’ll look pretty good. I think it’ll be a sea of similarity.” He compared it to the shift from skeuomorphism to flat design, when every interface suddenly looked the same. “All the websites looked pretty much the same. Animated. Not in a good way, by the way. I think that was a pretty shitty period.” He expects the same flattening to happen again, faster and at a greater scale.

But Peter was also optimistic about what comes after. “What that enables us to do as humans, as creatives, is the weird shit. The design that’s off-kilter, superhuman, and super unique. It’s going to be the thing that’s differentiated. I’m actually betting on a creative renaissance that will come on top of all of this.”

Kevin Funkhouser wasn’t so sure. “My fear is that because it’s business-savvy, cheaper, faster, it normalizes,” he said. “Whenever you’re opening your phone, and literally all of the experiences look the same way, that is your definition now of normal quality. And what is the reason you’re going to be able to justify for craft differentiation?” When “good enough” is cheap, the baseline changes. People stop noticing the difference because they’ve never experienced anything better. And if they can’t perceive the difference, good luck justifying the budget for it.

Peter Markatos and Maria Springer both worried about this generationally, but from different angles. Markatos: “My son, who’s 15, he’s growing up with this. The skills we learned to make things in the past, those don’t matter as much anymore.” Springer was more concerned about exposure: “A lot of their exposure is content, videos, whatever. If you’ve grown up with that, your definition of quality drops significantly.”

Alex Prodaniuk framed the economic question directly. “Does the human touch, the paintbrush stroke, the imperfection, does that become couture and largely inaccessible? Or does it become just high-end?” Peter Markatos’s answer was honest: “Depends on how good people are.”

Maria Springer put the structural divide bluntly: “Amazon doesn’t give a shit about craft. They care about optimization. They’re going to run all the A/B tests automatically. But other companies are going to care.” A counterpoint was made: “Amazon is pure utility. Apple is a luxury brand. They’re different businesses.”

Conner Drew added a data point from a product sense course he’d recently taken. The instructor had asked which brands come to mind when you think of taste. “The only company listed that’s in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world was Apple. The rest was Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia. None of them have taste. But that’s 90% of the top 10.”

The picture that emerged is a market that splits. On one side, companies that treat design as optimization and will happily hand that work to AI. On the other, companies where taste and craft are the product, where the thing that makes people care can’t be generated. The space between those two worlds is going to widen. Designers who understand which side they’re on, and can make the case for why craft matters to the companies that need it, will be the ones who thrive. The ones caught in the middle, doing competent work that AI can do just as well, are the most exposed.

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One thread kept running underneath the bigger debates: an interface is a kind of social contract. It gets decided on by a small group of people, and then everyone else has to live inside the decisions made on their behalf.

So what happens when interfaces start writing themselves? If a model can generate a new view, a new flow, a new control surface on demand, then the contract that used to be baked into a fixed interface becomes negotiable in real time — per user, per moment.

That led to a worry about agency. If the interface is the contract, and the contract keeps getting rewritten by a system you don’t control, then your ability to say no, to opt out, even to understand what you’re agreeing to, begins to erode.

The group kept circling a concrete question: who is actually accountable? Whose values get encoded when an interface is generated on the fly? Interfaces have always carried assumptions about who the user is and what they’re allowed to do. What’s different now is speed and scale — the assumptions are made faster, by fewer people, and propagated to more users than ever before.

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The word that kept surfacing, often when nobody expected it, was soul. The conversation reached for comparisons — a hand-built cathedral against a glass tower, something written by hand against something typed quickly — to name a quality that is easy to feel and hard to define.

Someone grounded it in something physical: the inherent value in human labor and time. A thrown clay pot, mid-century furniture, work that carries the evidence of a person who paused over it. None of this was nostalgia.

When AI can generate competent work cheaply and endlessly, the things that can’t be generated become the more valuable. Slow, hand-made, intentional things become luxuries. The backlash to work that is quietly machine-made is, at bottom, a reaction to the absence of that intention.

People can tell when something was made with care. What’s changing is that the gap between work made with intention and work generated without it is about to become the most visible dividing line in design. The audience for soul isn’t going away — if anything, as everything else gets easier to produce, the demand for work that feels genuinely human will only grow.

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Something close to agreement emerged by the end of the evening, though it stayed loose and people kept poking holes in it. The gist: the designer’s center of gravity is shifting — away from what the interface looks like, toward how the system behaves, and increasingly toward how it behaves over time.

If the old job was building the layer of craft between a user and a computer’s capability, the new job is shaping behavior and judgment. Designers used to make the interface. Now, more and more, they make the conditions — the constraints, the framework, the relationship of trust the product lives inside.

One designer described working downstream of the actual outcome, and the discomfort of no longer being able to define his value purely by craft. His own answer surprised some at the table: maybe the role moves closer to that of an artist than a maker of screens.

That raised a hard question. If you can run millions of iterations, how do you decide which one is worth keeping? The job that’s emerging is less about making things and more about deciding well — and being able to say why.

Near the end of the evening, the table came back to first principles. Optimism is kind of core to why design exists: the belief that things can be better, and that we are the ones who make them better.

“Good designers are progressive thinkers by nature, because we care and we have a drive to make stuff better,” Pablo added. People answered differently, but they were circling the same thing. The tools will keep changing. The economics will keep shifting. Competent work will keep getting cheaper to produce. And through all of that, certain things will still require a person who has actually thought about what they’re making and why.

Peter Markatos put it in terms of what he wants for his fifteen-year-old son. A designer in this era needs three things: rich life experience, critical thinking, and the ability to articulate ideas. “Creative directors who are articulate and have a rich life and can actually describe things — they’re still going to have a job.”

He didn’t say designers who can use the latest tools, or designers who ship the fastest. He said designers who have lived enough to have taste, and can put that taste into words and into action.

That’s a high bar. It always has been. AI just makes it visible. So maybe, while design is going through an enormous amount of change, the core of it isn’t changing at all.