I wasn’t afraid of AI. I was afraid it would erase the career I’d spent years building

When the AI boom started, every feed I opened had reached the same conclusion: design was dead. Every week brought a new tool, a new demo, or someone explaining that you no longer needed to hire designers because a prompt could handle it.

I told myself it was hype. But one question wouldn’t leave me alone:

What if this time it’s true?

I was scared that the career I’d spent years on was changing so fast I could get left behind.

So I did what a lot of us probably did: I tried everything. Stitch, Claude, v0, Lovable, and whatever came out that week.

Every demo was impressive for about five minutes. Then I always landed on the same thought:

Sure, but how does this help me build a real product?

Generating a nice-looking screen is one thing. Designing a product someone can actually use is another.

Over time, I realized I was asking the wrong question. Everyone was arguing about whether AI could design. Very few people were talking about how it could help us design better.

That turned out to be my real turning point.

When it clicked

In those months I watched a lot of people use AI to turn Figma designs into code. I did it too.

The moment that actually changed things came when I built a design system directly in code and asked Claude to put together a dashboard.

The first result was pretty bad.

My first reaction was that Claude wasn’t good at design yet. Then I understood the problem was me. I was asking it to make decisions without giving it enough context.

I tried again.

The difference was huge.

That’s when I understood why this really did change how I work. Not because AI took my place, but because it started giving me back the hours that used to go into building screens, iterating on details, and implementing changes.

Suddenly I had more time for the part of design I love most: understanding users, thinking through better experiences, exploring more ideas, and questioning decisions I used to accept because there wasn’t time or budget.

That’s what took the fear away.

Why Designers’ Tea exists

I started talking about all of this with Alejandra Zapata, and we noticed our conversations always ended up in the same place.

Online, we kept seeing the same old debate: will AI replace designers or not?

We wanted to talk about something else: what happens when you stop being afraid and start experimenting.

The mistakes and the uncomfortable moments. The tools that work and the ones that don’t. And what designing products with AI really looks like when the code ends up in production, not in a demo.

If you’ve ever felt that same fear, I think this conversation is for you too.

The first episode of Designers’ Tea is on Spotify and YouTube. We tell this story in much more detail and share what we’re learning while we build real products with AI.

To keep the conversation going, find us on LinkedIn as Designers’ Tea Podcast.