"AI will get meaningfully better at taste and judgment; designers are holding onto the idea of taste as a uniquely human moat a little too tightly."
Evidence from the Archive
Anthropic
At Anthropic, engineers now spin up 'seven Claudes' in parallel — designer mocking has fallen from 60-70% of the job to 30-40% in a few years
Jenny Wen argues designers are holding onto taste-as-moat too tightly; AI's sense of taste will get better and the classical design process is already dead
Jenny leads design at Anthropic — the company whose models are the benchmark for 'AI with taste.' Her front-row seat has convinced her that engineers shipping scrappy versions via parallel Claudes are outpacing the classical research-diverge-converge-mock design process, which she flatly calls 'dead.'
The mocking share of a designer's day has fallen from 60-70% to 30-40% in just a few years. Against that backdrop, she thinks designers clinging to 'we'll always be the arbiters of taste' looks like retreat into story rather than reality. She resists Lenny's consoling answer: AI's sense of taste will encroach on aesthetic judgment, and designers shouldn't over-index on taste as the permanent human differentiator. What endures instead is accountability — someone has to decide what gets built and own the consequences.
In Jenny's own words: "I think it will get better at taste and judgment and design. Yeah, I think we might be holding onto that a little bit too much and saying, 'Oh yeah, a designer or somebody will always know the best thing to ship or the best version of this.' But I do think AI's sense of taste will get better." (Responding to Lenny asking directly whether AI will get very good at taste.)