Mission Accomplished: How AI Finally Put Design Ahead (and Why That’s a Problem)

For decades, the mantra was simple: “We need design to be a quarter ahead of engineering.” It sounded reasonable — aspirational, even. But if we’re honest, no one ever really saw it happen. Somewhere along the way, design system support became the first thing to go, followed by user research. We shipped things untested, created one-off components, tolerated inconsistencies, and told ourselves speed was strategy.

But it also created a cycle: Iteration became triage. Fix the loudest complaints. Patch the biggest pain points. Move on to the next thing. We invested heavily in the feature factory but called it something else — efficiently producing motion without meaning.

2025: 94 feature enhancement pull requests are waiting for review first thing Monday morning. And new client features requested on Monday are ready for testing by Wednesday. Design, product, and engineering are all finally “ahead.” Mission accomplished. It’s exhilarating. Everyone in the entire organization suddenly has agency. Ideas no longer die in backlog purgatory. Momentum finally beats meetings.

So now we have to ask: How do we make sure the inputs to AI are the right ones? How do we preserve human qualities — taste, intuition, judgment, context — while letting AI do what it does best: ingest, process, and execute?

That’s where a cyborg metaphor comes in. AI isn’t replacing humans; it’s fusing with us. We’re not competing with the machine — we’re becoming part of it. A single, symbiotic system where human intuition directs machine precision. But the cyborg only works when the inputs are clean. When we’ve codified our thinking, our brand, and our logic into systems that machines can interpret.

In the age of AI, clarity is scalability. Structure is power. And systems are how we live longer.

Now those missing structures are coming back to haunt the machine. We’ve built incredible AI-powered creation pipelines, but we’ve starved them of guidance. The result? A new kind of chaos: synthetic consistency that looks right but feels wrong. Speed that excites everyone and scares us a little. We’ve introduced ghosts into the machine.

A design system isn’t just documentation anymore — it’s the loading mechanism for efficient cyborg operations. It’s how we teach AI what “good” looks like: how our brand behaves, how interactions should feel, what our hierarchy means.

The irony is that AI has finally achieved the dream: design is ahead, product is ahead, engineering is ahead. But if we don’t bring discernment to what’s being built, “ahead” just means “faster toward somewhere.”

Our new role as designers, strategists, and product leaders isn’t just to create — it’s to curate. To feed the system better inputs. To build the infrastructure that helps AI design with integrity. AI doesn’t need more prompts. It needs better context.

Because in the age of AI, clarity is scalability. Structure is power. And systems are how we live longer. The future isn’t human or AI. It’s human + AI, aligned by design.