Please don't tell junior designers that tools matter more than design

I rarely post on LinkedIn, but today I got frustrated reading yet another wave of posts about AI and design.

There's something really bizarre happening in the way AI is being talked about in the UX space. A huge percentage of the posts seem to be trying to convince designers, especially junior designers, that they're becoming obsolete unless they completely rebuild their process around AI.

That's nonsense. People are taking advantage of the anxiety that comes with being new to the industry... conveniently, many of the people saying this also seem to have something to sell.

The reality is much less dramatic. UX design hasn't fundamentally changed.

That doesn't mean AI isn't useful. It absolutely is. In fact, I think design is one of the areas where AI is valuable. You can use it for dummy copy, content generation, images, icons, brainstorming, exploring flows, generating variations, or quickly putting together prototypes that you can test and throw away. There are plenty of situations where it can save you time. But this is a whole lot different than making it the center of what you do.

Especially for beginners!

A junior designer doesn't primarily need another tool that can generate things for them. They need to learn how to think about what they need to do. They need to understand the design process. And not some abstract design process, but getting a project in front of them and solving it by understanding the customers, bosses, managers, developers, and arguing the solution and adapting it as needed.

Of course, people are going to use AI to make simple, mediocre websites, apps and prototypes, and that's completely great. Take some of the current AI design tools like Claude Design and Google Stitch, a lot of times you don't need more. But for anything beyond relatively simple work they are useless. They are slow, they make terrible design decisions even with perfect specs. Like, I'm sure it will get better, but if you want a good product, you need a proper design tool, it's just how it is. You need the industry standard, you need Figma, you need components, variables, constraints, flows, states, interactions, and a proper canvas that creates the main source of truth, that customers, business analysts, managers, project owners and developers can use to negotiate constraints and challenge, then have developers use. It's an obvious thing we all need. Product design is fundamentally collaborative.

AI can (at best) help with all of that, but it doesn't remove the need for it.

Forcing everything through an AI first workflow is just a non option. Best case scenario, really best best case scenario, you generate something barely usable, but you still don't have anything ready for even mid-term support.

Please don't convince young designers that learning the tools is more important than learning how to design.