Now with AI

Everywhere you look, something is suddenly "Now With AI".

Your notes app. Your fridge. Your dog camera. Your email inbox that now cheerfully offers to "fix your tone", like "I'll fix yours in a sec, mate".

We've hit that point in tech where new features feel less like innovation and more like a sticker slapped on the box so the marketing team can clock off early. It's the same vibe as when everything started shipping with "Dark Mode", even apps that had no business being dramatic. A discount shopping app does not need to brood, but I guess I'm a broody guy so dark mode it is.

And because AI is being force-fed into every corner of software, a lot of creatives are quietly exhausted by it.

Not scared of robots taking over. Scared of clients assuming your job should now take five minutes.

It wears you down after a while, and I guess we're tired.

Tired of every tool asking if you want to auto-generate something. Tired of clients assuming AI makes your work instant. Tired of being told you should use it more, or differently, or better. Tired of the pressure to keep up.

So let me say this upfront. I work with AI every day. I use it in my job and in my side projects. I've even used it to build things that probably shouldn't exist, like a golf pace-monitoring device that started as a joke and somehow became real.

After all these years designing across almost every discipline, here's the biggest pattern I've noticed. The tool belt just keeps getting heavier.

Mine has expanded from GIMP layers, to pirated Photoshop layers, to paid Illustrator layers, to free Figma layers, to the strange new reality of Canva layers, and now the abstract layers inside AI coding tools. Progress, apparently. But the one thing that never changed was taste. That part has always been human.

AI can create output, but it can't create taste.

Taste is your superpower.

Not skill. Not speed. Taste.

It's the sum of your creative life. Every project you've made. Every bad version you've thrown out. Every colour you now avoid because you learned better. Every choice you've sharpened over years of paying attention.

AI does not have that.

It has patterns and probability.

It predicts what comes next but it doesn't know why it matters.

Taste is the difference between "That's nice" and "That shit's fire".

And AI can't cook without you.

So where does AI actually help?

AI's real purpose isn't to replace your creativity.

It's to remove friction.

If you've ever:

• —stared at a blank page
• —rewritten an email six times (twelve if you're me)
• —wasted an hour on admin
• —made twenty variations of something just to find the right one
• —procrastinated because starting feels gross

AI is built for that.

It gets you to the part you are good at faster.

It skips the inertia and speeds up the messy early stage.

3 ways to use AI without losing your humanity.

1. Use AI to create momentum, not meaning. Blank pages are intimidating. Let AI put something on the page. It won't be perfect, but it gives you something to respond to. You're not outsourcing the idea. You're outsourcing the inertia.

2. Use AI to explore breadth, then you choose the direction. Think of AI like an endlessly energetic intern. It can give you twenty options in seconds. Most will be awful. Some will be surprising. One might spark something. The decision is yours. That is where your taste takes over.

3. Let AI support you, not steer you. The best creative flow looks like this.

• —You create
• —AI tidies
• —You refine
• —AI supports
• —You finalise
• —You finalise v2.8

Any moment where you think "I'll let the AI decide" is where the danger starts. AI loves being confident. It does not love being correct.

You're the one with judgment. Trust yourself.

A few AI inventions no-one asked for

• —AI that wants to optimise your relationship by writing texts for you
• —AI that generates recipes from the sad items in your fridge
• —AI that explains your own email back to you like you're the intern
• —AI that gives your dog commands your dog ignores
• —Dogs that give commands your AI ignores

The part that matters most

Here's the truth people get wrong. The rise of AI doesn't make your work less valuable. It makes the human part more valuable.

As AI floods the world with infinite output, taste becomes the real differentiator.

People can feel when work was made with intention.

With humour.

With care.

With a point of view.

Your taste, shaped by your strange ideas, your experiments, your failures, your instincts, is the rare thing.

The irreplaceable thing.

Everything else is just software.

Originally written for The Offline Dispatch, December 2025. Reading it back after eight months of shipping a full PLG product with AI tools at my side every day, it still holds. The thesis is the same: AI handles the inertia, taste stays yours. The difference is I have a lot more reps to back it up.