Hello!
Today I'm thinking about job hunting, specifically that the world you're applying for a job in no longer exists. There are remnants of it in bigger, older companies, but not for long. Why? Because the job descriptions most people are applying against assume a workflow that's already gone. For years, designers worked "out ahead" of engineering in mockups. Now development teams are "out ahead" of design, with new features becoming code at a furious pace, and design's job shifts toward making all that output fit together. At the Design Futures Assembly this spring, close to half of designers had shipped AI-generated code to production, and at the best teams the "stack" was dozens of internal tools that change month to month. Try writing a stable job req for that. So the natural reaction is to grab every tool and try to do every role. Designers pick up coding agents, developers spin up layouts, and everyone ends up here: That approach spreads us thinly across multiple complex and important jobs. I can play a developer on TV, but in real life I'm a pretty crappy one. The better move is the lesson we taught designers at Yahoo! years ago: double down on the thing you're uniquely good at and apply it elsewhere. So if you're looking for work right now, don't optimize for the job posting. Get hands-on with the tools, figure out what they can and can't do, and show how your particular superpower reaches further because of them. That's the job that actually exists.
What are the most effective ways to cultivate the "taste" and "craft" needed to stand out when using AI tools for design?
I'll admit something up front: I've personally found it very hard to teach taste. When I have a designer who's a great systems thinker but doesn't have a feel for the visual design layer, I haven't been able to teach that to them. So if you're asking how to cultivate it, the honest answer is that it takes deliberate, ongoing effort. But it can be done.
Start with what you feed yourself. Steve Jobs put it well back in 1994: taste comes from exposing yourself to the best things humans have done and bringing them into your own work. AI tools make it trivially easy to generate something "fine," which means your reference library (what you consider good) matters more than ever.
Next, treat evaluation as the real work. Two years ago I launched the chatbot you're talking to right now, and people mostly ask me what model it uses. But the real work is constantly looking at the questions people ask, evaluating whether it responded well, and course correcting when it didn't. That tuning and constant feedback is applying taste, applying a perspective. Every time an AI tool hands you output, ask: is this actually good? Why not? Then fix it. That loop is how taste gets sharpened.
Then get your hands on the real material. At Perplexity, designers work directly with the actual product, not just mockups, and collaborate with engineers on prompting. You can't develop craft for a medium you only look at from a distance. The only way to learn what works and what doesn't is to dive in and start making. And at the frontier, designers aren't just using new tools, they're building them, which is a great way to understand where the seams are.
Finally, rebuild the muscle of having an opinion. For years, a lot of designers have been designing for approval (getting sign-off from PMs, engineering, VPs, legal), and the skill of pushing a point of view atrophied along the way. Now that whoever writes precise instructions can hand them to an agent, your value is judgment about what should exist, what good looks like, and whether it's working. The best software comes when people with strong opinions on how it should work are working directly on the code.
And don't underestimate your own life experience. Machines can brute-force their way to what gets better click-through rates, but steering for emotional impact draws on a lifetime of feelings you've actually lived. So go live some.
Put simply: look at great work, make a lot of stuff, judge it ruthlessly, and have a point of view about it. Repeat until it feels obvious.