What Designing With AI Taught Me About Being Human

In 2025, I designed faster than I ever had in my career.

Not because I suddenly became more disciplined, but because AI quietly removed the friction that used to slow me down. I could generate personas in hours instead of weeks. I could explore multiple complex flows in a day. I could audit parts of a design system without starting from nothing.

From the outside, it looked like progress.

But somewhere between generating my fifth persona and reviewing my tenth AI-assisted insight summary, I noticed something uncomfortable.

I wasn’t tired from doing too much.
I was tired from deciding too little.

Designing with AI didn’t make my work less human.
It made me more aware of when I stopped being human in my thinking. So, I wonder…

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When AI Becomes a Mirror

The first time AI generated a set of personas that looked good enough, I felt impressed.

The structure was there. The motivations made sense. The frustrations were believable.

And that’s when it hit me.

These personas weren’t insightful - they were familiar.

They mirrored patterns I had already internalised over years of designing. AI didn’t invent anything new. It simply reflected what I had been doing but faster.

That reflection was confronting.

If AI could reproduce my thinking so easily, it meant some of my design decisions had become habits rather than choices.

AI became a mirror.
And sometimes, the reflection showed me where curiosity had quietly faded.

Personas Are Easy. Conviction Is Not.

In 2025, I created more personas than in any other year of my career.

AI helped me draft, refine, and stress-test them. It surfaced assumptions. It filled gaps. It accelerated clarity.

But when it came time to present those personas to stakeholders, the questions changed.

People didn’t ask how they were generated.
They asked whether I believed in them.

AI could help me create personas.
It couldn’t help me stand behind them.

That responsibility - deciding what mattered, what to prioritise, what to defend - remained human. Speed didn’t remove accountability. It amplified it.

User Testing Reminded Me That Insight Isn’t Empathy

AI made user testing outputs cleaner.

It summarised feedback. Grouped patterns. Highlighted themes.

But the moments that stayed with me weren’t in the summaries.

They were in the pauses.
The hesitation before an answer.
The frustration someone tried to laugh away.

AI could tell me what users said.
It couldn’t sit with how it felt to hear it.

Empathy didn’t come from synthesis.
It came from attention.

When Speed Stops Being the Advantage

By mid-2025, execution stopped being the bottleneck.

I could generate flows, components, and variations faster than teams could review them. The question was no longer Can we design this? but Should we?

This became especially clear in design system work.

AI could help audit components and surface inconsistencies. But it couldn’t navigate organisational politics. It couldn’t weigh legacy constraints against future scalability. It couldn’t decide when consistency mattered and when flexibility mattered more.

Those decisions lived in grey areas.
And grey areas don’t respond well to automation.

Judgment became the real craft.

Systems Made Responsibility Visible

Design systems in 2025 weren’t just about reuse.

They were about governance, intent, and impact.

AI expanded the reach of decisions. Which meant the consequences of those decisions traveled further than before.

Every token, rule, and constraint carried downstream effects.

AI amplified my influence.
Which meant it also amplified my responsibility.

There was no hiding behind best practices anymore - only clear intent or its absence.

Letting Go of Designer Ego

And this impacted me the most - the hardest part of designing with AI wasn’t learning new tools.

It was letting go of an identity.

For years, being a designer meant being the expert - the one with answers, taste, and control. AI disrupted that comfort.

Good ideas could come from anywhere. From machines. From non-designers. From unexpected places.

My role shifted from creator to orchestrator.
From expert to editor.

At first, it felt like loss.
Eventually, it felt like clarity.

The best work didn’t come from proving I was right.
It came from staying curious long enough to choose what was better.

What Stayed Human

After a year of designing with machines, I don’t believe AI is here to replace designers.

It’s here to remove the hiding places.

It exposes shallow thinking. It challenges comfortable habits. It forces us to be explicit about why we design the way we do.

What stayed human was never the output.

It was the doubt.
The judgment.
The care.
The responsibility to choose thoughtfully when speed made it easy not to.

That’s what I’m carrying into 2026.

A Quiet Note If You’re Designing With AI Too

Throughout this year, I’ve been building and refining prompt kits - not as shortcuts, but as thinking scaffolds.

They’re designed to help designers:

• Frame better questions

• Slow down decisions when AI speeds things up

• Apply judgment, not just generation

If you’re navigating design in the age of intelligent systems, you might find them useful.

Explore the Design x Machine prompt kits

No pressure. Just tools I use myself.

Goodbye, 2025. Here’s to designing with more intention in the year ahead.

-Ryda.