The tools are learning to see, and the pace of it has caught me off guard.
A few months ago the machine could draw. Now it can look at a thing and describe it, edit it, extend it past its own edges, and give me twenty variations before I have finished a thought. What was a novelty in the spring feels ordinary by the autumn. That compression is the part I keep turning over. Not what it can do, but how quickly the answer to that question changes.
So I have been trying to work out where my own lines are, quietly, before I have to decide under pressure.
I will hand over production. The resizing, the variations, the eightieth version of a thing at a different aspect ratio. That work was never sacred to me. It was just work, and I have done enough of it not to feel much romance about it.
The decision is a different matter. Which idea. What to remove. What this person, this business, this one human being with a real problem actually needs. If I let the machine settle that, I am not sure I am designing any more. I am prompting, and prompting means working from someone else's sense of what is good.
The relationship is the other thing I want to hold onto. The conversation where a business owner finally tells me what is really going on, which is rarely what they wrote in the first email. That has always felt like the actual work to me. The drawing was mostly what fell out of it.
So the line sits about where it always did. Let the tools take the tedious parts, and keep the choosing and the listening close. I just did not think I would be sorting this out quite so soon.