Treat AI like a junior on your team

The routine part of design got cheap. Research summaries, layout variants and first drafts of copy now take hours instead of days. That changes what a working day looks like. It doesn’t change who is responsible for the result.

The model that works for me is simple: treat AI like a junior on your team. Hand it the routine. Review what it gives back. Keep the decisions.

One link, one task

Recently I gave an agent a link to a hotel search screen from a real work file and one task: rename the layers by meaning, the way they would be named in code, and tell me where it lacked information to build the screen without questions.

It renamed 298 layers in one request. “Button text” became “score”, “reviews-count” or “separator”, depending on what each layer actually was. Then it found things I had missed:

• the search said 6 nights, the cards said 10;
• the search said Almaty, the map showed Astana;
• five hotels in the list were the same hotel: one name, one price, one photo;
• the cards came in two widths, 736 and 795 pixels.

It fixed those too. It recalculated prices for 6 nights, synced the map with the cards and made five different hotels, using photos from other screens in the same file. Where a designer’s decision was needed (hidden buttons, extra nesting, error states, an empty result) it changed nothing and only marked the spots for me to look at.

The part only you know

Once the agent “fixed” something that was right. It removed “from” before the prices on the map. The “from” was there because hotels have rooms at different prices. That reason wasn’t written anywhere in the mockup, so the agent couldn’t know it.

Why a decision is the way it is, only you know.

How to start without making a mess

• Move your system first, not your screens. Tokens and components in code. Otherwise AI invents a new design system with every prompt.
• Pick one source of truth. Figma or code. Two versions drifting apart are worse than either one.
• Review it like a junior’s work. It drafts fast. Taste, edge cases and the final call stay with you.
• Start with one flow. Ship it, compare it with how you worked before, then decide for the whole team.

Speed buys you thinking time. Try more options, then spend the saved hours on the hard part. Give the boring work to the agent and keep the interesting part for yourself.