AI Shortened the Distance Between Designing and Building

There's a version of the AI conversation I keep seeing that doesn't match my experience building at work and at home.

The version where AI does the work. Where the idea becomes a product almost automatically, and the hard parts get skipped.

That's not what happened for me. AI actually changed a single thing: the distance between "I can design this" and "I can try building this" got shorter. As a designer who had spent years making things feel real inside Figma, that change mattered. I could stop imagining how a feature would feel and start finding out. The feedback loop collapsed from hypothetical to actual. But the building itself? Still hard. Debugging behavior I didn't understand, cutting scope I wanted to keep, making a hundred product decisions with no one else in the room.

AI made the human parts of the work more obvious, not less. Taste still had to come from somewhere. Judgment still had to come from somewhere. The reason Mise should exist in the first place still had to come from somewhere. None of that came from the model. It came from 12 years of cooking for my family, from the frustration of planning the same five meals every week, from wanting something I couldn't find.

AI helped me close the gap between an idea and a real thing. But the idea, and the reason it mattered, that was already there.