Anyone Can Cook.

For a while now, assembling a screen from an existing design system hasn't taken much time and effort. Consistent components, tokens, patterns, the pieces already fit together before anyone touches them. What used to take craft now often just takes assembly, and increasingly, an AI does that part fine on its own. NN/g's State of UX 2026 report is direct about it: work that's just slotting together existing components is already within reach of the tools doing it faster.

What doesn't transfer to a machine is judgment: knowing which components belong together, why one pattern serves the actual problem better than another, when to break from the system entirely. The same report names what that requires: developed taste, judgment shaped by real user research, and the ability to reason through tradeoffs, not just execute them.

That distinction shows up as a specific failure mode too, one NN/g calls design theater: going through the right steps, running the right workshop, filling out the right template, without any of it actually shaping the outcome. It looks like a process, but it is one without judgment.

To summarize: The work that's getting easier is the part that was always closest to assembly. The work that's holding its value is the part that still needs a person to actually think it through.