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Real Talk on AI from the Patterns Leadership Summit Panel
Last week I joined the opening panel at the Patterns Leadership Summit with Chris (CEO of Knapsack), Jason (Sr. Product Designer at BILL), and Ranjeet (Director User Experience Design, AI at Informatica) to tackle a deceptively simple question: where are design and engineering headed in the age of AI?
Spoiler: nowhere obvious. The lines between these roles have never been blurrier — or more exciting. Designers are vibe coding, engineers are generating UIs, and executives are pretending they’ve read the Gartner report.
AI is the accelerant, but speed isn’t the real story. The real story is: what do we do with this newfound surplus of possibility?
GenAI + Design Systems: Bootstrap All Over Again
Most AI-generated UIs look like they were separated at birth. Think back to when every website screamed Bootstrap, then later Material UI. That’s where we are now. Design systems are the cheat code. Either AI learns to build with your system, or we inch toward some mythical “One Ring to Rule Them All” of universal design (unlikely). Either way, it’s a brilliant case for designers: the easier generating UIs with AI gets, the more irreplaceable taste and design expertise become.
