The gap has never been this fun to cross

I've been making things for as long as I can remember. Drawing came first — I was the kid who never really put the pencil down. Then, when I was 11, my dad installed Photoshop on the family PC, and twelve years later I can still remember how exciting that felt, like being handed a key to something. Design was the first thing I properly fell for: how things look, why one layout feels right and another feels subtly off.

But I was always a little too curious to stop at the visual. A lot of what I made as a kid orbited Minecraft, and tinkering with servers is where I accidentally learned to code — long before any of the current AI wave, purely because the technical side was fun too. Changing something and watching it actually run was its own kind of satisfying. Funny enough, the same game ended up pulling me toward both halves of what I do today. That curiosity never left, and it's basically the whole reason I do both — "design engineer" is just a slightly fancier label for a designer who likes building things.

I bring it up because the conversation about AI and design has gotten a bit heavy lately, and I don't think it needs to be. The line everyone repeats — AI won't replace designers, it'll augment them — is true. People usually say it to calm nerves. I'd rather say it because I think it's genuinely exciting.

Yes, augmentation quietly raises the bar: when a tool can do in an hour what used to take a week, the baseline for what one person can make goes up. But flip it around. The floor for what a single curious person can build has never been higher. The distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a working thing" has mostly collapsed. For someone who builds for fun, that isn't a threat — it's the best toy we've ever been handed.

I'm not going to pretend I know where it all lands. Anyone giving you a confident five-year prediction about design right now is guessing with a straight face. What I'm more sure of is smaller and more personal: building things has never been this accessible, and curiosity has never paid off this fast. The thing I loved as a kid — poking at something technical just to see what happens — turns out to be one of the most useful instincts you can have at the moment.

There's one thing I think genuinely lasts through all of it: taste.

Knowing what's worth making, noticing what's quietly wrong with something that's technically fine, knowing what to cut — that's the human part, and honestly it's the best part. A tool can hand you output. It can't hand you the reason something's worth doing. I find that reassuring rather than scary.

So if there's anything I'd gently nudge, it's this, and it isn't a warning: if you've ever been a little curious about the side of your work you don't currently do — the building, the designing, whatever your other half is — this is a really fun moment to follow that. Not because you'll be left behind if you don't. Just because the gap has never been this easy, or this enjoyable, to cross, and curiosity has a way of compounding.

That's the spirit I try to work in. Most of what I make now runs end to end — I design it, then I build it, and it stays closer to what I imagined because nothing gets lost in a handoff along the way. Half the things on my site started as "I wonder if I could," which is still my favourite reason to make anything. I genuinely don't know exactly what I'll build next — but I'm more excited to find out than I've been in a long time.