There’s a nod that happens in product meetings now.
Someone shares a prototype. It moves. It looks like a thing. And the room does it, that small collective nod, the one that says okay, this exists now.
Nobody checked if it’s right. Nobody asked what problem it actually solves. The screens looked convincing, so the room decided they were.
And if you commissioned something in the last two years, there’s a good chance you were in that room.
That nod used to come later. After the uncomfortable part. The part where nobody quite agrees, where the brief keeps shifting, where you sit with the problem long enough that it starts showing you something. Now it shows up in the first meeting. Sometimes before the meeting ends.
That’s where something quietly broke.
Vibe coding tools made this too easy to do.
Figma Make. Lovable. The ones landing every other week. Not bad tools. Genuinely impressive, actually. But they handed That Lazy Human Brain an exit it was already looking for.
You can go from idea to interface in hours now. The prototype arrives before the thinking does. Speed collapsed the space between question and answer. And that space, the uncomfortable, unclear, nobody-wants-to-sit-here space, is where you figure out not just what the product does, but how it should behave. How it should stay coherent when features multiply and users do unexpected things.
That part doesn’t produce screens. It produces decisions.
And decisions don’t get you the nod.
I think about phone keyboards.
Swipe typing arrived and felt like progress. Glide your thumb, words appear. For a one-line reply it genuinely is.
But try writing something that needs thought. A message you don’t want to misword. An idea still forming. Something where the wrong word changes the meaning entirely.
The keyboard starts guessing. You correct. It guesses again. You lose the sentence halfway through because now you’re managing the tool instead of the thought. The friction is in the wrong place. It’s not creating a pause so you can think. It’s interrupting you mid-sentence.
So you go back to tapping.
Not because tapping is smarter. Because the small pauses between keystrokes give the thought room to form. Enough space for the idea to catch up with the output.
Swipe typing optimised the motion before understanding the mental process behind it.
Boring.
Same pattern. Different product.
Here’s what the decision maker inherited from all of this.
Not a failed product. Something subtler. A product that works but feels like work to use. Where nothing is technically broken but everything feels slightly off. Where users figure it out but never quite settle into it. Where the team keeps saying it just needs a few tweaks, and the tweaks don’t fix it.
Because the thing that’s wrong isn’t in the UI.
It’s in the decisions that were skipped when the prototype looked good enough and the room did the nod. Surfacial. No depth. The visible version of the problem got solved. The actual one, the one that shows up in month three when the novelty is gone, wasn’t accounted for. Nobody sat with it long enough.
That Lazy Human Brain found its exit early. And now you’re living with what it cost.
AI didn’t break design thinking.
It exposed how quickly we were willing to skip it.
The real shift isn’t loud. But it’s happening.