Show notes
So this month Marcus and I get into a slightly uncomfortable question. If AI can knock out decent interfaces from a text prompt, where does that leave the people whose day job is opening Figma and making screens look nice?
We start with Google Stitch, which has been getting a lot of attention lately. Then we zoom out into something I have become mildly obsessed with, which is building AI skills. Not prompt snippets, but reusable, documented processes that let you get consistent work out of AI without drowning it in context.
App of the Month
This month’s tool is Google Stitch (v2), Google’s AI UI generator. You describe what you want, it produces an interface, and you can do some light manual tweaking.
It is not a full replacement for Figma. The editing controls are basic. The bigger story is what it represents. We are now at the point where a decent, usable UI can be generated fast enough that the real value shifts from "can you draw the screens" to "can you judge what good looks like." That is where experience, and yes, taste, starts to matter.
If you want to compare approaches, I mentioned Figr again, which I still prefer for the quality of what it produces.
Are UI Designers Becoming Vinyl?
The question Stitch raises is not "can AI design interfaces". It clearly can. The question is what happens to the job market when "good enough" becomes cheap, fast, and widely available.
I found myself telling 2 different clients recently that they could probably skip hiring a UI designer. They had tight budgets, tight timelines, and already had solid brand guidelines or a design system. In those situations, I could push the work through AI, iterate it a bit, and get something perfectly serviceable.
That line of advice made me feel a bit grubby. Not because it was wrong for those clients, but because it hints at a bigger shift.
My worry is that UI design becomes like vinyl records. Most people will not need it. A small number will care deeply and pay for it. The middle ground shrinks.
Marcus made the important caveat here. Some designers will still be in demand because they bring something AI cannot easily fake. A distinctive visual style. Creative judgment. Brand thinking. The ability to make something feel like it came from a real point of view, not a model averaging the internet.
We also talked about where UI designers can expand their value, because "I make pretty screens" is not a great long-term career plan.
Broaden into UX and problem solving. Look past the interface and into the business problem, user needs, and research.
Own the stuff between screens. AI still tends to think screen by screen. Humans are better at flows, journeys, and the messy reality of how people actually get from A to B.
Lean into information architecture. For websites especially, the structure and content model matter as much as the visual design.
We used a music analogy that will probably annoy some people, which makes it perfect. AI tools can generate "background" output that is fine for low-stakes use. They will not replace great musicians. But they will reduce the number of gigs available.
AI Skills As a Career Asset
After we finished terrifying UI designers, we moved on to something more useful. I think a lot of roles are going to need an AI toolkit. Not a handful of clever prompts, but a proper library of reusable skills.
When I say "AI skills," I mean documented processes that an AI can follow reliably. Think SOPs you can run repeatedly, not prompt snippets you copy and paste.
I now have around 60 skills in my library, and it is growing constantly. Outside of the Boagworld website, it might be the most valuable business asset I have.
The reason is consistency and context management. AI can produce terrible output when you dump too much information on it at once. Skills let you break work into focused chunks and chain them.
We talked about 3 levels of skills:
Company-level skills
Standard processes that keep things consistent. Proposals. Expense claims. Holiday booking. The sort of stuff that should not depend on one person remembering every step.
Team or discipline skills
For example, UX teams can create skills for personas, journey mapping, surveys, and top task analysis. That helps remove bottlenecks and lets colleagues do decent work without reinventing the wheel.
Individual skills
This is where it gets interesting for your career. These are the skills that capture how you do something, including all the weird little bits you have learned over the years.
A key point here is that the value is not only in having the skill. It is in creating it. Writing down a process forces you to surface assumptions and explain what "good" looks like.
We also got into AI agents. If you describe your skills well, an agent can chain them to complete bigger jobs. I gave a sales example where a meeting transcript can be turned into a CRM entry, follow-up tasks, company research, and a draft proposal with very little manual effort.
That is exciting. It is also mildly terrifying if you are attached to the idea of being indispensable.
For more on AI Skills read: Your AI Toolkit Is Your Competitive Edge
Read of the Month
I mentioned an article that helped me connect a few threads in my own work. UX, conversion rate optimization, and design leadership can look like 3 different things until you realize they all operate on the same system.
The piece is called "How CRO and UX Work Together to Increase Website Conversion".
It frames CRO and UX as two sides of the same coin. CRO asks, "Did they convert?" UX asks, "Was it easy and enjoyable?" I would add that UX also cares about what happens after conversion, because retention is often where the real money is.
The shared foundation is data. Analytics, event tracking, heat maps, session recordings. The same signals can tell you where people struggle and where the biggest conversion wins are likely to be.
It also reinforced something I believe strongly. CRO and UX should not sit in separate silos. Both work best when they cover the entire journey, not just one page at a time.
Marcus’ Joke
"I just purchased an original Van Gogh coffee table. I know it’s original because there’s a bit of veneer missing."
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