Six months ago, my superpower was having a folder full of screenshots of web elements that I really liked.

It was around 2012.

I was living in Bratislava, maybe not even yet dating my ex-wife, and I was trying to run a design studio.

I really only made about 30 euros in income, which still felt great.

I bought a laser printer, which was heavily overpriced at that moment, didn't make me a graphic designer. What I wanted to do was websites and business cards and stationery. And yeah, I had a dream because I was not all too happy with corporate life at that moment.

It's 2026 and I'm not a designer.

I'm still not a designer, by far not one that has great skills.

But the interesting thing is that today you can delegate almost every skill to artificial intelligence. I kept on doing that with a very low rate of success.

So the problem was that describing something with words doesn't even work with a kick-ass designer, let alone AI.

Because translating into text or into the mind of somebody else is not an easy task. It's actually pretty, pretty difficult. And it's difficult even when there's a real designer on the other side of the table, one who's maybe studied it, maybe has a lot of great work behind his or her belt.

So ultimately, with AI, one of my key things has become, when it comes to design, putting together a small folder of screenshots of simple elements I liked.

It took me an hour.

If I saw multiple things that I liked, I just left the screenshot like that.

And if there was just a singular element, I would trim whatever was not that prominent.

Whenever I was building something, I was very naturally including that folder.

Up till the point when, with one project, I simply forgot.

By a weird coincidence, what actually happened was I got a design out of the same elements, even though I didn't include them.

They were not part of the prompt.

And I didn't add them to context, but they were still there.

And at that time, I realized the fact that AI cannot have your taste is not so true anymore. Then later, I even realized that this is not true from actually two different directions.

So first, AI picked up the things that I liked and regularly implemented.

But it also shaped my taste a little bit into something that it felt is really complementary.

This would be science fiction to me in 2023.

But right now, I think most people don't even realize how naturally this is happening.

And there's one thing to conclude this post with.

There is a pattern here.

The same thing happened with code guidelines and coding.

The same thing happened with agentic workflows.

At some point, everything was working in a way using hacks like markdown files, enriched context, manual orchestration, deterministic orchestration, or design folders.

We don't need most of that anymore.

And if there is any case of AI requiring a bit of creative work around getting the best or better results, it's just a matter of months, maybe weeks, and this is very naturally going to become better with something like a new model or new harness release.

What a time to be alive!