Dan Maccarone, founder of the product-design studio Charming Robot, recounts what changed after a year rebuilding its process around AI:
Before anyone accuses me of sneaking speed back in through the side door: the sprint is still five days, and nobody here got faster at design. What went away was the relay.
This time, we built all five states at once. Live. Interactive. Flip a toggle and watch the page rearrange itself for a logged-out stranger versus a power subscriber. Switch to mobile and it’s already there. Same five days, an order of magnitude more product. The work got deeper, and depth was the thing that, for years, blew out schedules and drove us crazy with minute details in UX and design.
This is what redesigning the factory floor looks like: not making each station faster, but removing the relay and reorganizing the work around what AI makes possible. The practical advantage is broader attention. More of the product becomes available for judgment before it hardens into implementation.
And because that documentation is generated from the prototype instead of maintained next to it, it cannot become out of date. Every change order rebuilds it. Move a state, kill a screen, rethink a flow, and the user stories, the acceptance criteria, and the error conditions regenerate to match what is actually there. You can lay the docs and the working prototype side by side and catch a contradiction in seconds, while it is still cheap to fix.
But a prototype can preserve the current answer without preserving the reason for it. Maccarone’s experience brief keeps that responsibility on the human side of the workflow.
The one that’s really going to hurt you is much more subtle and is rarely communicated. It’s the why. Why this flow and not that one. Why this default, this state, this tradeoff. The AI never writes that part down, because the AI never had a reason in the first place.
Because AI is so good at producing a confident, finished-looking deliverable, the temptation is to let the prototype become the spec, to let the thing that looks done stand in for the thinking that was supposed to happen first.
