The Future of Digital Product Creation, Vibe Coding and Reusability
Or, How to Inject Fun Back Into Digital Production and Avoid Your Yourself Becoming a Chatbot Named Chad
There’s a fever dream sweeping product teams: AI-fueled everything.
Everyone’s vibing. You toss a prompt into the AI void and, abracadabra, a fully formed product! No code. No handoffs. No designers stress-drinking oat milk lattes over pixel tweaks. Just frictionless creation. Cue the investor applause. And cue the moans and groans from designers and engineers.
Digital Production Has Become as Sexy as a Fax Machine
Somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic making digital products became super boring. We’re not being very creative anymore. It’s become the corporate version of laundry day. Everyone needs it. Nobody’s excited.
The funniest part is hearing my fellow designers and engineers claiming that their craft is at risk from AI when they have a job making buttons or landing pages for a big nameless corporation.
Clasping tightly onto the mundane and crappy work like it’s a creative masterpiece is not only laughable, it’s disingenuous to real creativity.
Creativity is probably why we were attracted to these fields in the first place but we often also need to pay the bills. That’s okay. No shame in that. Just don’t bullshit yourself by posting that your creativity is being threatened by AI.
We need to stop trying to convince ourselves boring work is noble just because it was once the domain of creative people. Call it what it is and allow yourself to see the opportunity in the inevitable changes that are already upon us. There’s a very real chance that AI or automation could really change your life in a good way. But first you have to take a good look in the mirror and decide what you’re fighting against.
Before you lose hope. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. While not perfect, new technology has a habit of reducing the mundane work and freeing up time to do the fun stuff. The question is, will we have the courage to let go of the things we’ve attached our identities to and actually embrace this new way of working?
The Beyond-The-Canvas Movement (Sorry, Figma)
The new AI inspired product production vision doesn’t just ask for change, it lights the old process on fire and roasts marshmallows over it. We have to stop passing around static mockups like they are somehow improving things. Just because your canvas tool has collaboration features, doesn’t mean its making design collaboration easier. A static file in Figma is still a static file. A handoff from Figma is still a handoff. We need to stop polishing the turds.
Instead, we need to move to real-time, AI-assisted product creation with the actual constraints of validated and browser-ready components.
We need the mindset of turning the mundane into automation. Similar to how Amazon turned its infrastructure headaches into AWS. Suddenly, what was tedious became lucrative. I started my tech career when it was necessary to build your own servers from scratch. What a pain in the ass that was. What a world we live in that you can go to AWS and get ready-to-use servers so you don’t have to build your own.
Your design process and systems can become something more than a graveyard of abandoned Figma files.
And here’s where the fun sneaks back in: if you are willing to give over the drudgery, like the endless pixel pushing, mind-numbing ticket Tetris, and redundant coding, to AI, you can reclaim your creative time. This isn’t about replacing creativity; it’s about unblocking it. Instead of spending hours adjusting margins or rewriting the same button styles, designers can focus on crafting systems and aesthetics that scale.
This shift transforms product creation into what it should be: a collaborative, dynamic process where people feel energized instead of drained.
For engineers, it’s a liberation from grunt work. No more copy-pasting components or translating design specs into front-end code that inevitably gets reworked. Now, they can lean into automating the repeatable and engineering the extraordinary — building smarter tools, focusing on performance, and solving the problems that actually require human ingenuity.
Prototype-and-Prune
Julie Zhuo describes this shift elegantly with her ‘prototype-and-prune’ framework. Rather than spending cycles crafting pixel-perfect mocks and writing verbose PRDs, teams start by rapidly prototyping dozens of ideas. From there, they prune ruthlessly, only nurturing concepts that meet real technological capability, deliver accuracy, and run at production speed. It’s product gardening at its best — playful experimentation followed by decisive editing.
This mindset frees teams to act faster and smarter. Designers and engineers can explore wildly different directions without fear of wasted effort. The stakes are lower when you know pruning is part of the process, and AI is handling the heavy lifting. Instead of months of debate and documentation, you get continuous learning loops — and a product development cycle that feels more like discovery and less like death by committee.
It’s not the end of design or engineering. It’s the beginning of something more playful, more human, and yes, more fun. The boring stuff is handled. What’s left is the good part: experimenting, refining, creating things you’re proud to ship. So instead of feeling like you’re trapped in another Slack thread about border-radius, you’re back to why you started doing this work in the first place — to make cool things that people love.
A recipe for making digital production fun again
If you’re groaning through another sprint of tedious production work, it’s time to face reality: you love your craft, but most of your time isn’t spent doing the fun, creative parts. That can change.
Start by letting AI take the wheel on the mundane. Feed it structured, validated components from your design system — the good stuff, not yesterday’s spaghetti Figma. Think spinach and avocado, not leftover pizza. With AI doing the heavy lifting, you’re not handing over the creative reins; you’re freeing yourself up to actually be creative again.
Prototype rapidly, prune ruthlessly. Stop designing every button like it’s your thesis project. Say after me, “this isn’t art school.” Systems over screens. Patterns over perfection. And when you’re finally ready to ship, do it with confidence. Use what’s already been tested. No more hoping the dev gods are listening — what you see is what ships. AI handles the grunt work. You handle the taste. You’re the sommelier with a keyboard
Metrics You Can (and Should) Brag About
- Component Reuse Rate: Because reinventing the button 57 times is not a strategy.
- Iteration Speed: Fast, but not so fast that you forget to test it on actual people.
- Handoff Elimination: Fewer Slack messages, fewer migraines.
- Trust Indicators: Less churn. More applause. Maybe even a LinkedIn post or two.
AI Is Your Assistant, Not Your Boss
Yes, AI will make things faster. It will also make it easier to build junk at scale. The winners will be those who stay ruthlessly human — curating, questioning, and taste-making in ways no algorithm can replicate.
So go ahead, automate. But remember: your customers aren’t just data points; they’re people. And people have taste. If your product feels like it was generated by a bored intern named Chad? They’ll notice. And they won’t come back.
