It's 11:40 on a Sunday. You are not building anything. You are not designing anything. You are reading, line by line, the confident AI slop of a machine that wrote it in four seconds and will write the same slop again tomorrow.

AI design tools are genuinely impressive. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and this isn't a piece about protecting the profession. v0, Framer AI, Webflow AI, whatever launched in the last six months that I haven't used yet – they can produce something that passes for a real website faster than any human can open a new Figma file.

That's not the problem.

The problem is what gets generated alongside the layout. AI tools are excellent at visual pattern matching – they've ingested enough well-designed websites to know how a homepage should be structured. Hero section, value proposition, social proof, CTA. Correct. What they can't do is figure out what your value proposition actually is, who it's for, or why anyone should believe it. So they generate something that fits the pattern. It sounds like a website. It has all the right components in all the right places.

You're thinking about using AI for design work. Maybe you already started. Someone told you it's the future, and they're probably right, but let me tell you what nobody mentions.

I spent six months in 2025 using AI tools daily. Made me faster. Also made me worse. By June, I couldn't defend my own design decisions anymore. Wrote a book about it: Looks Good to Me: On AI Sycophancy, Context Loss, and Inverted Baselines (Apple Books). It's free. This is what I'd tell you if we were having coffee.

You know how this goes.

Three weeks on the portfolio. Rewrote the case study twice. Rebuilt the layout because something felt off at midnight on a Wednesday. Sent it to two designer friends who said it was strong. Found the right contact on LinkedIn, personalized the message, attached the link.

Three days later: automated rejection. No subject line variation. Thank you for applying.

Different company, same month. A referral came through – someone you’d worked with two years ago, mentioned your name in a Slack message to someone they knew. You sent a portfolio link you hadn’t touched in weeks.

First-round interview confirmed within 48 hours.

I wrote this book without AI. Every chapter, every argument, every edit. Four months, a notebook, and no tool that would tell me my drafts were compelling.

The most predictable version of this project: run the manuscript through ChatGPT, get told each section is “well-structured and insightful,” ship it. A book about AI sycophancy, produced with the help of a sycophantic AI. The irony would have been neat. The argument less so.

Anyone who’s tried it knows what happens. You get agreement. You get polish. You get “great point – you might also want to consider…” followed by something you already said, reworded. Occasionally it suggests adding an executive summary. The book has no executive.

What you don’t get is resistance. Not real resistance. Building a sustained argument requires something pushing back – saying a thing, testing it, finding where it breaks, deciding whether the break invalidates the claim or sharpens it. That process needs a counterforce. AI is not a counterforce. It’s a mirror with better vocabulary than you.

The book is called “Looks Good to Me.”

That’s what the mirror says.

https://cyberpunk.lol/@vantablack/114756539405197662

Can I get some suggestions for template websites for medical office website. Looking for something simple / straightforward. Mostly Home, Contact Us, Services, Testimonials, About Us.

Not sure if I can use just static pages to achieve this OR will I need something more involved to support Contact and Testimonials?

I've VPS and can host a website. I want to support open source designs if possible.

A UX strategist is supposed to bridge business goals and user needs through high-level planning. They’re meant to answer questions like “Should we build this?” and “Which problems matter most?” before anyone opens Figma.

In practice, most I’ve worked with excel at one thing: not committing to answers.

“Should we prioritize mobile or desktop?” “It depends on your user base.”

“Which feature should we ship first?” “It depends on your business goals.”

“When should we launch?” “It depends on market conditions.”

Every answer buys them more time to conduct another research phase, run another workshop, build another framework. They become professional question-deflectors who get paid to suggest you need more information before making any decision.

And here’s the thing – they’re not wrong. Everything in product development genuinely does depend on context. But when “it depends” becomes the primary output of someone earning $120-180 per hour, you’re not getting strategy. You’re getting expensive procrastination.

I’ve made pricing pages I was quietly proud of. Clean grids. Calm colours. A monthly/annual toggle that felt clever until it pushed the CTA just enough to break the fold on Safari. In screenshots, they looked convincing. In practice, they behaved like polite doormen who never actually opened the door.

This is the personal version of what I learned the hard way.