April 2026

AI tools are changing how fast an idea can be tested, not what a good idea is

Vizcom and similar tools compress what used to be a day of rendering into a few minutes of iteration. That's a real shift, not a gimmick, and I use it constantly early in a project to burn through weak ideas faster.

What it hasn't changed is judgement. A tool that generates twenty variations of a surface in a minute still needs someone to know which one is actually resolving the design problem, and which one just looks plausible in a thumbnail. If anything, the bottleneck has moved: it used to be production speed, now it's decision speed. The designers who benefit most from these tools are the ones who already had strong instincts before the tool existed.