The Drip
AI can put an idea in front of someone while the conversation is still fresh. Christine Sheller described taking notes from a client workshop, putting the thinking into Claude and Figma Make, and returning with a clickable prototype about an hour later. That changes the way teams make decisions.
Inside The Bottle
There is a very real gap between making something quickly and making something good.
Christine’s point was not that designers should stand between everyone and the tools. People are going to make things. The question is whether they have the context to make things that actually serve the brand, the user, and the business.
That is where judgment comes in.
AI can help get an idea out of your head and into a prototype fast. It can make the first pass on a mood board, a wireframe, a flow, or a little product you have been meaning to try. But the first pass is not the finish line. Christine described it as getting to 80% at 90 miles an hour, then crawling through the last stretch trying to get it right.
The last stretch is not wasted effort. It is where someone notices the generic pattern, asks whether the thing is memorable, catches the mismatch with the brand, or decides the work product is asking too much of the people who have to adopt it.
Kellan raised the other side of this: people cannot consume change at the same pace AI can produce it. A financial model that once took a week can now appear in two hours. The people affected by it still need time to understand it, question it, and use it.
So the work is not just “make more.” It is shared context, good taste, and enough room for people to come along.
Lab Notes
| ■ | Justin's note: Somebody with real experience and expertise will absolutely dominate somebody who does not, even if both are using AI for the same task. |
| ■ | Kellan's note: People cannot consume a process change at the pace you can now build the work product. |
What Stopped Our Scroll
| ■ | Figma’s 2026 AI report — 41% of product builders now say AI meaningfully changes how their teams collaborate, up from 7% two years ago. The individual speed boost is becoming an organizational coordination problem. |
| ■ | Does generative AI make us think alike? — Across 19 studies, researchers found a small but significant homogenization effect in human–AI co-creation: better individual outputs can still make everyone’s work more alike. |
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