When anyone can generate a competent interface in minutes, competent stops being impressive. Customers can smell a clone, a bolted-on feature and lazy AI output almost instantly. What they notice, and remember, is a product that feels like one coherent thing, made by people who decided what to leave out.
Ask an AI for a “modern SaaS app” with no direction and you get the average of every SaaS app it has seen. The result is fine. It’s also indistinguishable from thousands of others, and people have learned to spot it.
The deeper problem is inside the product. When each new feature costs an afternoon, it’s easy to keep adding them, each reasonable on its own, until the product becomes a drawer of features. But users, especially in enterprise tools, don’t think in features. They have a job to do. They want to get in, get it done, and get out. Every feature that doesn’t serve that job is something they have to look past.
I’ve built products where every feature was defensible and the whole was still confusing. With agents, that failure can happen ten times faster. It’s also the first time in software history that there’s truly no excuse for anything less than the best-designed, most usable version of a product.
The ideaDesign journeys, not features. Make every addition earn its place by what it improves and what it removes. Encode the team’s taste, its principles, system, journeys and anti-patterns, into the skills every agent builds with. And use unlimited refinement to raise the bar, with a person owning the final call.
Here is what “no decision” looks like next to a product where someone chose every detail for a specific customer. Turn on the markers to see the fingerprint.
Brief: “A tool for coordinators to manage today’s requests.” Left: the statistical average. Right: designed for the job.
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A decision: the job is the interface, and nothing competes with it
A coordinator doesn’t open the product to use a feature. She opens it to close out today’s requests before lunch. Every feature is judged by one question: does it make that trip shorter and clearer, or does it add a detour?
Job: close out this morning’s five requests. The same capabilities, bolted on one by one versus woven into the journey. Illustrative.
Users don’t remember features. They remember whether the tool got out of their way.
Every addition should answer the same questions before it ships, and one of them is always “what does this remove?” A feature that serves the job and takes something away is a win. A feature that serves no job, no matter how clever, is a cost everyone pays.
Pick a proposed change to the coordinator’s list screen. The deltas are my estimates of the effect on the core job.
If agents build most of the screens, the team’s taste has to live somewhere they can read it. Not as adjectives, which the model averages, but as specific decisions: the system, the journeys and their step budgets, the voice, the anti-patterns to avoid, and examples of good and bad. Every correction a designer makes more than once belongs in the skill.
This is where designers’ work moves. Instead of drawing each screen, they author and tend the taste that every screen is built from.
A sketch of one team’s design skill. Pick a file to see what it holds.
Refinement used to be rationed. Polish was the first thing cut when a deadline got close. Now an agent can critique a screen against the team’s rubric, fix what it finds, run it past the customer panel, and do it again, many times, before a person looks at it. The bar isn’t “good enough to ship.” It’s “the best version anyone could make.”
Illustrative scores against a five-part rubric: consistency, hierarchy, clarity, accessibility and craft. Press play.
Taste can become one person’s preference dressed up as principle, which is why it has to be written down, explained and open to challenge. Distinctive isn’t the same as unusual: in enterprise software, familiar patterns help people move fast, and breaking them needs a reason. Beauty can’t rescue a broken workflow; attractive design makes people forgive small problems, not big ones. And accessibility isn’t a style choice. It belongs in the rubric from the first pass.