I believe in the shokunin mentality. Obsessive iteration, pursuing mastery across decades. But the designers building at the frontier right now are telling a different story.
Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company, visited Cursor, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Krea in San Francisco. Former Apple designer Jason Yuan, now building his own AI startup:
“You can’t do the old school Apple thing of like, create lickable craft and interface. You can’t because, by the time you’ve done the best interface for ChatGPT 3, you’re on GPT 6.”
That stings a little. The Apple tradition assumes the target holds still long enough to polish. When the platform shifts every few months, polish is a liability.
Anthropic’s head of design Joel Lewenstein is making the same bet:
“Things are moving so fast that we just have to experiment faster. Convergence is hard. Because you have to figure out what’s shared. You have to build that shared path. You have all of the fringe things that people loved on these other systems. And there’s too much changing too quickly.”
Anthropic built Cowork in five or 10 days (depending on who you ask). Ship first, converge later.
What’s telling is who’s embracing this. Yuan and Abs Chowdhury—both former Apple designers, trained in the tradition of lickable craft—have each gone all-in on vibecoding at their startups. Chowdhury transferred rough designs from Photoshop(!) straight into AI code tools. Yuan built his first product mostly alongside AI:
“There’s a new reason to raise lots of money, which is compute. If you have lots of conviction, and you know exactly what you want, like, why would you hire another 20 other people right now to tell you what you’re doing? It’s a coordination cost.”
Yuan calls this the best time to be an “auteur.” The designer who doesn’t wait for engineering to realize the vision, who directs AI the way a film director directs a crew. It’s the orchestrator gap playing out in real time.
I’m not ready to abandon the shokunin mentality. But I’m starting to think the object of obsession needs to shift, from polishing pixels to refining judgment. The craft isn’t in the surface anymore. It’s in knowing what to build.
Wilson’s full piece covers a dozen people across the industry and is worth reading end to end.
