Tools Shape Craft and Output

It's not uncommon to see people sneer at pixel perfect mockups, this way of working was heavily influenced by the prominence of the Adobe tools in many workflows and the carryover of a print mentality to digital work. With the advent of tools like Sketch and later Figma, no-code tools, design systems / component libraries, or even accessible frameworks to "design in code", these workflows seemed outdated to some. (I still see enough of a debate about fidelity of artifacts across different realms of practitioners to think the matter is not actually settled.)

Of course it feels normal and valuable to ask similar questions about the impact of AI on workflows. You see people tout the acceleration of handoffs (or supposed elimination of handoffs), faster exploration of variations, vibe-coded prototypes, etc.

Tools shape craft and by extension also the output.

But I cannot deny finding it lopsided that so much of the conversation is about output - faster and more widgets generated.

I see far too little discussion about raising the quality (and by all means, also the quantity if you want) of our inputs. Make better decisions, with better insights. And I am not sure the currently all too common idea of "just have AI synthesize your research" is the answer here.