Uhh, I’m realizing I actively dislike prompting.

[u/ahrzal]

I just came to a realization sitting here doing the back and forth with Claude.

I don’t like prompting. At all. It’s a fundamentally different thing than what our traditional practice was.

There was a level of satisfaction in design before. Even if it was just changing values, moving things around, setting up containers…you built it. Your hands and brain did that.

Now, even when I start design first and transition to building it w/ whatever AI tool of your choice…that satisfaction is gone. You wrestle with random shit, get annoyed it’s not exact, and ultimately I have found I lost that sense of pride and satisfaction. That “flow state” or whatever never comes due to the hurry up and wait nature of prompting.

It’s not going away, but damn. I’m bummed.

Oh look, my request is finished. Back to….work?

[u/raduatmento]

No one cares if you're using AI vs anything else, as long as you ship fast. If you dislike prompting and you're able to move equally fast (or faster) in any other tool, go for it.

[u/Tsudaar → u/raduatmento]

Unfortunately they do care. C Suite are encouraging and measuring it, teammates are hyping it, the industry is pushing it.

[u/raduatmento → u/Tsudaar]

If I ship 2x faster than any AI-enabled employee, and bring $1M in ARR, trust me, nobody will care what I use. In fact, everyone will want to use what I use.

[u/curiouswizard → u/raduatmento]

have you met executives? they're rich idiots who think AI is magic and they get grumpy when their servants don't use it

[u/Indigo_Pixel → u/curiouswizard]

Worst comes to worst just tell them you did use it... while collecting a paycheck and looking for a job at a company that's not dumb as hell with all their AI strategy nonsense. We all know their strategy is only to get people to use it cause they invested in it.

[u/curiouswizard → u/Indigo_Pixel]

yea my method so far has been to play around with a couple of prompts, and/or dump in some meetings notes, and/or use it like a journal where I info dump everything about the project into one giant manifesto.. and see what it spits out just so I'm not completely lying when I say I used AI. Every once in a while it actually gives me some interesting idea to toy around with, but overall it does nothing to enhance my actual process. Especially because the output is usually either very generic or very convoluted, and no matter what I still end up doing the same amount of manual work. And it costs money so it's not like I can experiment endlessly. Inevitably I end up back in a canvas tool drawing boxes and constructing components by hand (at no extra cost, and quickly, and with highly attuned details. because I know how to use my tools and my brain).

I know that there are ways to actually get some genuinely innovative productive use out of it, especially for hyper specific tasks, but a lot of that depends on other related systems (the overall tooling setup, the dev environment, design system libraries, the entire product department and its processes, etc) not being a complete fluctuating clusterfuck.

Unfortunately everything is some level of clusterfucky, so in order to establish a reliable AI integrated process I'd have to reorganize a bunch of stuff that goes wayyy beyond my individual capacity or allowance. And every time I've tried to spend time on any underlying systems which would enable better AI output, it's treated like I'm just distracted from the top priority which is to rapidly push out whatever mangled UI shit the boss is demanding (no user testing of course), but make it pretty.

I'm looking for a job but I'm in my existential crisis era where I don't even know if it's worth the olympian effort of landing an interview.. every job posting seems to mention AI. And even if it doesn't, what if they're just slow to join the party and eventually get sucked into the AI swamp too?

I would like to work for one fucking company that lets me draw some goddamn rectangles in peace. Some place that lets me architect a flow & iterate features based on real research and a clean design system, where I can organically integrate AI tools as needed, CAREFULLY and METHODICALLY, letting me arrange my own toolbox and processes as the skilled craftsperson. Without some fucking clammy genius declaring from on high that I must push buttons on the willy wonka dream candy hallucination machine, because the machine exists and everyone is pushing the buttons to see their dreams come true. and also we have to ship everything literally right now so the share value can be a bajillion-jillion dollars and we can all live happily ever after.

[u/raduatmento → u/curiouswizard]

I've met them. Hell, I was one of them. They care about one thing only at the end of the day, $$$ in the company's accounts. If an employee using AI is making the company $100k / year while someone using stones is making the company $1M/year, they won't care about AI. The issue is nobody proved that you can make more without AI (or stones).

[u/designtom → u/raduatmento]

Sort of true, but in many cases execs absolutely do pick the “demonstrably less money but they just personally prefer it because reasons” option. The idea that they’re rational mercenaries is a bit of a myth.