Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Why is AI so bad at design?

2 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky argues AI design tools copy existing work like Linear's site instead of innovating. Design requires novelty and randomness that AI struggles with, and current tools can't capture semantic relationships between UI components across a rebrand.

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It was probably last year where every new website that came out was just a copy of Linear's website. Linear's website, great design, great taste. If a model did that, I'd be like, wow, this is incredible leaps here. If I have a model that outputs Linear's website every time, that's not the challenge here. There's an amount of novelty that is more important in design than it actually is in software engineering. Software engineering, you must want it to over-index unknown patterns. Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of randomness here and novelty. It's about the abstractions. If tomorrow our company did a rebrand the shallow version of this is that we have to update 263 components one by one. The deep version is the semantics between these two things that look different. They're both in lists that have this style that convey this interaction pattern to the user. That is still feeling a little bit out of reach with the current technology.