Why I'm Not Worried About AI Taking Over Creative Work

You know what’s funny? Every few years, there’s a new tool that’s supposedly going to replace developers, designers, or creative professionals entirely. Remember when visual website builders were going to eliminate the need for web developers? Or when templates were going to kill graphic design?

Now it’s AI’s to be the villain.

I’ve been coding for over two decades, and I’ve learned something important: tools don’t replace creativity. They just change what we spend our time on.

The Real Story

I started playing with AI tools about a year ago, mostly out of curiosity. What I found wasn’t a replacement for human creativity, but something more interesting: a really good brainstorming partner.

Take our work on design systems, for example. We built this Figma plugin called CVA (Controlled Generative Design) that uses AI to help create design system components. Sounds scary, right? Like we’re automating designers out of existence?

Nope. What actually happened is that designers stopped spending hours creating variations of buttons and started focusing on solving real user problems. The AI handles the tedious stuff: generating 15 different button states with proper spacing and colors. The designer focuses on whether those buttons actually make sense for the user’s journey.

It’s Just Pattern Recognition, Really

AI is actually good at recognizing patterns in massive amounts of data and recombining them in new ways. That’s useful! But it’s not magic.

I remember working with a client who was convinced AI could generate their entire app design. We tried it. The AI created something that looked… fine. Generic, but fine. Like a stock photo of an app.

The problem wasn’t technical, it was that the AI had no context for what the business was trying to achieve, who the users were, or what problems they were actually solving. It could make something that looked like other apps, but it couldn’t understand why someone would want to use this particular app.

That’s where humans come in. We’re really good at understanding context, dealing with ambiguity, and making decisions based on incomplete information. (Plus, we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences of our choices.)

Where It Gets Interesting

The sweet spot I’ve found is using AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement. When I’m stuck on an architecture problem, I’ll sometimes describe it to ChatGPT just to see what patterns it suggests. Not because I’ll use its exact solution, but because explaining the problem clearly often helps me think through it better.

Same thing with writing. I’ll occasionally ask AI to help me outline a blog post or suggest different ways to explain a technical concept. Then I throw out 90% of what it gives me and use the 10% that sparked a better idea.

The Human Parts That Matter

What AI can’t do (at least not yet) is understand what it feels like to be on call at 3 AM when the payment system is down and customers are angry. It doesn’t know the satisfaction of finally fixing a bug that’s been haunting you for weeks. It can’t appreciate the elegance of a simple solution to a complex problem.

Those experiences (the frustrating, exhausting, occasionally beautiful reality of building software) that’s what gives our work meaning and makes it genuinely useful to other humans.

Looking Forward (Without the Hype)

Will AI change how we work? Absolutely. Just like Git changed how we manage code, and responsive design changed how we think about layouts, and cloud services changed how we deploy applications.

The developers who thrived through those changes weren’t the ones who ignored the new tools or panicked about being replaced. They were the ones who figured out how to use the tools to do more interesting work.

So yeah, I’m experimenting with AI. I’m building it into some of our processes where it makes sense. But I’m not worried about it replacing what we do here at Toki Labs.

Because at the end of the day, someone still needs to understand what problem we’re actually trying to solve. And last I checked, that’s a very human skill.