Dan Saffer
Assistant professor of the practice and associate director of outreach at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he teaches interaction d...
“There is this weird unease about all of our products, not just AI itself, but the products that AI are generating are becoming illegible to us. They're very hard to read. They're very hard to undo.”
AI and Design · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
Reacting to an essay about no longer knowing an AI-built design system by heart, Saffer widens it to AI-built software in general: nobody can say why a component exists or where its limits are.
Transcript
And finally, Nick has a conversation with Nicole Donnelly, the founder of AI Smart Ventures. But first, the news.
…of unease. I'm creating output without understanding. And that was something that I've been coming to terms with over the past couple weeks with how I'm building. And I think that this article really put a point on something that I've been thinking in the back of my mind for some time right now.
Yeah, I had a couple of thoughts reading this. One is exactly what you just said, which is, yeah, when you're building things and you don't quite know where's that component come from or how does that exactly work? Or why did you choose this? Why did you choose a carousel over a list? Those kinds of things that you used to, obviously you would choose something because, yeah, you were used to working with it or you had built it yourself or you were using a very standard design system that is part of the design team, basically. I know that was my experience was that you had a design system that was handed down. And so everyone around you knew the design system and knew what fell outside. Of it and what didn't work. And it is hard when you have an AI-generated one to know what's in boundaries, what's out of boundaries, when do you use something, when do you prompt to use something? That's a real question that's out there. This also reminds me of how I think it must be like to do these…
Yeah, but I will say that I think right now, when you are developing a design system, even within a company that has an established one, well, actually, there are a lot of companies that don't even have very established design systems. I've talked to many designers who are at a large organization.…
Now, wait, they have a design system. It's just a mess.
Yes. And well, that's the interesting thing here: it seems like these AI-generated design systems maybe avoid the mess. There might be something about how we work with them, maybe because, again, to what you're saying, it might be that we're still building it up from the beginnings. And so it's a…
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