There is a border in my workflow, and I patrol it personally. Everything south of it — databases, APIs, the scaffolding that makes an app run — belongs to the machine. Everything north of it, the look, the feel, the thing a stranger's eye catches first, stays mine.
This is not modesty. It's triage.
September 2026. GPT-6 in one tab, Claude Opus 5.1 in another. Both can write a checkout flow without a typo. Neither, unprompted, can make something beautiful.
Tell either one to make a beautiful website and watch the result: a kind of aesthetic default setting, competent as elevator music. It has ingested every design blog since 2010 and learned nothing about wanting.
Hand it a reference — Apple's site, say — and the output sharpens fast. These systems copy with unnerving fidelity now: shadow angles, spacing ratios, motion curves across forty interlocking components, checked and rechecked in tight organic loops. But copying is not taste. It's very good triangulation.
Taste doesn't transmit as instruction. It transmits as friction — the gap between what you mean and what you can say, compounded by the gap between what you say and what the model hears. Better prompts shrink that friction. Sharper references shrink it further. It never reaches zero. Language has a built-in coefficient of loss, and design lives in the decimal place beneath everything language can specify.
Craft is not the accumulation of decisions. It's the return to the same decision, again, with slightly more information each time.
A font choice, a padding value — these are just the visible joints. The real labor happens underneath: the fortieth pass on a button nobody will consciously register as correct. AI doesn't loiter. It produces and moves on. Polish requires staying in the room after the meeting has technically ended.
I'm optimistic this changes. Not soon.
Some nights I'm still at that border, nudging a value from 24 pixels to 26, then back. The machine waits on the other side, tireless, capable of almost anything — except the twenty-seventh look.