AI Can't Taste

The Fine Problem

There is a moment when you use AI to generate a design and it comes out... fine. Clean, technically correct, no obvious flaws. But also forgettable. Generic. Something missing that you cannot quite name.

That missing thing is taste.

I am a product designer with 7+ years in design rooms, design systems, and real products shipped to millions of users. I know what good feels like because I have seen what bad does to conversion, retention, and team morale. When I hand a design to an AI to implement, it executes. But the quality of the output is bounded by the quality of the input, and the input is my taste, not the model is.

The Direction Problem

Here is the thing people do not tell you about building product design: you do not just struggle with execution. You struggle with direction.

Every product I have shipped, there was this constant tension. Am I solving the right problem, or am I just making something that works? And then the other voice kicks in: is this design actually good, or is it just functional?

Visual direction keeps shifting. Design system tokens feel off but I cannot articulate why. The spacing is correct but the rhythm is wrong. Little things that make a product feel cohesive versus just... assembled. Without a clear spec, you are not just designing. You are fighting yourself on what "good" even means. And that ambiguity bleeds into every decision, slows you down, and makes you second-guess every call.

The Fix

This is the exact problem I ran into building my portfolio.

I knew what I wanted. Clean, editorial, minimal but not cold. But translating that to code while also thinking about responsive layouts, component states, interaction details? My focus kept splitting. Half the time I was solving "does this work" and the other half I was asking "is this actually good?"

So I stopped trying to do both at once.

I opened Figma and built the entire visual system first. Typography scale, spacing rhythm, component states, hover interactions, the layout grid. Every decision in one place, nothing ambiguous. Then I handed it to Claude Code with the Figma context and let it ship. The AI did not design this. I did, just with cleaner handoff.

The Multiplier

What AI gives you is leverage. It takes your taste and multiplies it. But you still need the taste. Without it, you are just running a prompt that produces something that looks like design but has no soul behind it.

If you are relying on AI to generate design direction, not just implementation, you will end up with a portfolio that looks like everyone else is. Clean, correct, forgettable.

The differentiation is not the AI. It is what you bring to it.