Okay is the Enemy

We're at this strange, mind-blowing point where you can build basically whatever you imagine. An idea in your head can be a real thing on the screen in an afternoon. The wall that used to stop you (time, tools, knowing the right thing to do...) has mostly disappeared.

That should be the best thing to ever happen to people who make things. And it definitely is. But there's a catch.

When making things was hard, mediocre work cost effort too, so at least you noticed it. Now you can generate something clean, competent, and perfectly functional in two minutes. It looks finished, and what matters is that it works, right? Well, that's exactly the problem.

Okay is the enemy. Not bad work, you catch that. The dangerous one is the version that "looks" fine: the information is tidy, it took you an afternoon, and hey, it doesn't make you want to shoot yourself in the eyes when you look at it (or maybe it does). AI makes "good enough" so cheap that, if you let it, it lowers your standards without you noticing. The easier it gets to make something, the easier it is to settle. The point of being able to make anything isn't to make more acceptable things faster. It's to stop having an excuse for okay at all.

Here's the key thing I've been turning over since AI took off. If the tools got ten times more powerful and ten times easier to use, my standards should go up ten times too (or a hundred), not stay the same while I just do it faster. Because a lot of the time you don't fully control the design either, and the first result should never be the final one. It's like in design school when they told you not to marry your first idea.

When something was hard, "pretty good" was a fair place to stop. You'd earned it. Now that the hard part is handed to you, pretty good isn't a goal anymore, it's a starting point. Especially in the work you actually care about. The great advantage of this new era is the range it opens up to go past the edges and push generic design toward something that's genuinely yours. Wasting that room on faster mediocrity is almost a crime.

The biggest change for me personally is that the line between designing something and building it basically disappeared. I think of myself as a very creative person, someone who comes up with ideas on the fly, any kind of idea. A lot of those ideas were born and died in the same instant, the moment they hit the gap between "I can picture it" and "I can make it real." But the same way humans used to die from the first cold they caught, technology has given those ideas a longer life expectancy. I can take what's in my head, build it, and keep refining it until it matches the idea. My idea, the design, and its code are finally part of the same conversation instead of two separate fights.

So this is what I'm actively wrestling with right now, every single day. Not falling into the comfort of taking the easy path. Something that's helping me a lot with this is Josh Puckett's Interface Craft course.

AI changed my process for the better, no question. But the best tools don't make better work on their own. For me, the rise of AI and how easy creation has become is a double-edged sword: yes, everything is easier, but that's exactly why the bar should go up and dare you to actually reach it. For a designer, "fine" costs you dearly in the long run when there's no growth coming from the work. In a normal process you used to learn as you created.

Now it's hard to develop that imagination and that taste through a terminal. You have to show up with your homework done and your taste sharpened, so you can tell what's good and what isn't, what works and what makes you look like someone who doesn't just use AI but knows how to handle it to push their ideas as far as they can go.

Thanks for reading