The newest trend in design will be words.

A lot of what we’re seeing today in the developer space is oriented around the acceleration of value. AI being the trendy topic, it’s only natural that corporations want to appear invested, employees want to seem knowledgeable, and investors want to see it supported. I won’t bore anyone reading this with a list of examples; throw a stone and you’ll hit five. Still, just to summarize, AI seems to be the latest threat used by some people coming for the lunches of engineers, designers, project managers, and, to some extremes, generally other people, in the most haunting way.

Asking an LLM when ChatGPT became mainstream seems trite, but I did, and the answer I got back was 2022. That seems like a short and long time ago at the same time. Short, in that it’s only been a few years, but long when it comes to the industry’s race to innovate exponentially faster. People can build all kinds of things, in varying capacities of “good” or “bad”, cheaper now than ever. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” is not why I’m writing this, though.

On the other side of React Miami 2026, I’m thinking back to James Mikrut’s Robots Can’t Taste and Serge Leon’s The Anti-Shiny Object Syndrome, both fantastic talks that share intention as a through line. The former highlights how AI can’t have opinions or points of view, and how those are still the responsibility of the user. The latter was a study on one company’s findings while growing out their codebase and building lasting tools. One takeaway from both: human input and discretion are key. Maybe that’s not saying much, but it’s important enough to repeat and remember. The “human in the loop” is more than just a checkbox.

Even so, as we try to design better ways to accept AI into our workflows, it feels to me like there’s always a fuzzy border to keep an eye on. Adoption of these tools often foments proliferation of these tools, and that pushes the border closer to human users, leaving us with less to have a say in. Which is why I think we’re overlooking what’s likely our best design tool.

You’re reading them, actually.

In 2013, Mig Reyes wrote a fantastic post that’s stuck with me reminding us that design is still about words. I think that’s probably more true now more than ever. Websites are simply a medium for us to contextualize our content, and applications are a throughway for us to move that content and context around. AI tools are certainly capable of generating content, but without the human experience, it will only parrot what it thinks we want. We can guide it, but that doesn’t replace thought, consideration, care, and detail.

Is it possible it may learn how to accomplish that in time? Yeah, but the funny thing about the human experience is that it’s probably the one thing that changes exponentially faster than technical innovation. As long as we don’t allow human creativity to be quashed, I can see a world where AI may expedite the technical, but we as humans will drive the experience we want our users to feel, not simply use or see.

Really roundabout way to suggest that you start creating or blogging again, but if you read this far, I must have done something right, huh?