From Chess to Poker: How Speed Changed Design Before AI

Research, planning, sketching, prototyping, testing, information architecture, long conversations and iteration all made sense in a world where development was the bottleneck and mistakes were costly. That was the environment that produced what some people now look back on as the golden age of design.

Back then, product development felt more like chess than poker. Chess rewards patience. You study the board, think several moves ahead, and try to understand the consequences before acting. A weak move can haunt you for a long time, so deliberation matters. The better prepared player usually wins. Software used to work much the same way. When every product decision was expensive, slow to implement and hard to reverse, careful thinking was not indulgent. It was just rational.

Then everything sped up.

Development got faster. Shipping got easier. Agile broke big, risky projects into smaller, less risky increments. Tooling improved. Teams became more cross-functional. We moved away Big Design Upfront and towards something smaller and more agile. And now AI has compressed the cycle further still. You can come up with an idea in the morning, have a working prototype by the afternoon, and push something live by the evening.

Once that happens, the economics of thought begin to change. It is often quicker to ship an AI-generated prototype than it is to run a considered design process. And if the prototype is wrong, the instinct is no longer to avoid the mistake in the first place. It is to fix it tomorrow, or ship another version by the end of the week. Teams are no longer trying to play the best, most considered game of chess, where the best prepared player wins. They are trying to speed up the play of poker, getting through as many hands as possible, placing lots of small bets, and staying in the game long enough to get dealt pocket aces.

That is a very different philosophy of winning. Poker is faster, messier and more fluid. You make decisions with incomplete information, read the table, act under uncertainty and adjust as new cards appear. You do not wait for certainty because certainty never comes. What matters is not whether you have thought everything through, but whether you can move quickly enough and keep playing long enough for the odds to work in your favour. That feels much closer to how many product teams operate now.

As that shift took hold, process started to collapse. Over the last decade, the combination of ever-growing backlogs, shorter delivery cycles and relentless pressure to ship has squeezed out many of the conditions thoughtful design once depended on. Not all at once, and not in some dramatic moment, but steadily and almost invisibly.

Wireframes and paper prototypes we seen as wasteful. Especially when so many designers felt they could achieve more, faster and at a higher fidelity in Figma. Design thinking was lampooned. The Double Diamond was pronounced dead on arrival. Personas were considered harmful. Good formative research became poor customer discovery. Usability testing got replaced by build, measure, learn. We even argued about what to call ourselves. Everything we used to apply rigour, slow things down and switch into system 2 thinking got stripped out. And what was left? Delivering PRDs from somebody else's backlog.

Design did not disappear so much as get compressed, hollowed out, industrialised. Turned from a mode of inquiry into a mode of delivery. Work became less about framing the problem, exploring alternatives, or surfacing hidden assumptions, and more about keeping pace with the machinery of shipping.

That is what creates the strange irony of the current moment. Everybody says they want more design thinking, better product judgment, better user empathy and better strategic choices. Hell I've even seen folks claim that designers and needed more than ever before. They just do not want to give designers the time or space to think in the ways that used to produce those outcomes. What they want is the output of slow thinking without the slow thinking bit. They want the confidence that comes from research without waiting for research, and the answer without the wandering. They want the outcomes of design thinking, but not the tools designers once used to get there: the workshops, the sketching, the divergent exploration, the rough prototypes, the user interviews, the whiteboard sessions and the false starts.

Teams still need comprehension. In many cases they need it more than ever. But they no longer have much patience for the visible rituals that used to create it. That matters because the real bottleneck in many fast-moving teams is no longer production. It is comprehension. The difficulty is not making things. It is understanding what is happening well enough to make good decisions: understanding the user, the market, the trade-offs, the second-order effects, the hidden risks, and the reasons something feels off before the metrics tell you so. Production has become so fast that comprehension is now the thing that feels slow, and slow things always come under pressure.

So decision-making gets relocated elsewhere. It moves into product instinct, founder conviction, engineering constraints, executive preference, market momentum, or vibe-based calls made in the moment by whoever has the strongest opinions and the least patience. This is one of the more important shifts in modern product development. People still say they value design, but often what they mean is that they value taste and vibes rather than thought and process. They want someone who can look at a screen and instantly say, yes, this feels right. They want someone who can steer the work in real time. They want judgment on demand. They want fast intuition, not slower reasoning. Because taste is instantaneous, vibes are instantaneous, and thought is not.

When it is quicker to generate and ship a prototype than to run a considered design process, thought starts to look like friction. That is why the current moment feels so exposing. AI has arrived in an environment where process was already weakened, where much of design had already been recast as a delivery function, and where decisions had already started moving upstream or sideways. The new tools simply make that reality harder to ignore. If a team mainly values rapid production, quick iteration and surface-level polish, then AI is going to look increasingly competent. And when that happens we start to reach an event horizon.

The harder parts of design have not gone away. Framing the right problem still matters. Understanding human behaviour still matters. Making sense of messy situations still matters. Knowing which bets are worth placing still matters. But those forms of value are slower, less theatrical and harder to see in a culture obsessed with velocity.

That may be one reason we are drifting back toward a world of genius design. Not in the romantic sense of the lone visionary, but in the older sense that the work depends on a small number of people with highly internalised pattern recognition making rapid calls under pressure. What product teams now describe as product sense can sometimes be exactly that: design thinking compressed, internalised and turned into instinct. Sometimes that instinct is real expertise. Sometimes it is just vibes masquerading as judgment. And when process disappears from view, it becomes much harder to tell the difference.

That is the risk with vibe-based decisions. They feel logical in the moment. All system 1 decisions do. They create momentum. They sound confident. They help teams move. But they may also be sending the product quickly in the wrong direction. The faster the cycle time, the easier it is to mistake motion for insight.

This is the tension underneath all the current talk about AI and design. The question is not whether AI can generate artefacts. Of course it can. The more important question is whether organisations still care enough about thought to make room for it. Because if they do not, what survives will be a thinner version of design: styling at speed, prompted production with a layer of taste, and fast bets guided by instinct rather than careful reasoning.

Maybe that is enough for some teams. Maybe, in some contexts, it is even the right trade-off. But we should at least be honest about what is happening. Product development now rewards compressed cycles, quick bets, fast judgment and plausible output. It rewards enough taste to make things feel coherent, but often not enough patience to understand whether the underlying decision was wise.

That leaves designers with a genuine challenge. The task is not to defend every old ritual as sacred, nor to pretend we can rewind to a slower era. It is to work out what thoughtful design looks like in a world where process has collapsed, System 1 is crowding out System 2, and it is often faster to ship something half-right than to think something through properly.

That world is not going away. The tools will keep getting faster, and the distance between idea and execution will continue to shrink. Unless designers find ways to reintroduce comprehension, reflection and judgment into that environment, design will continue to be reduced to vibes, not in one dramatic moment, but one fast decision after another.