Recently, for my birthday, my parents passed down a beautiful old chess set to me. It’s over 100 years old, and it’s been in our family forever. I don’t know the whole story behind it, but it’s essentially handmade. Each piece was carved by a human hand. I’ve begun teaching our 4-year-old daughter to play on it, which has been really special.

On the surface, this old chess set is not fancy. However, it has a certain simplicity and quality to it that has made it more and more beautiful over its life. The top is leather, and has a beautiful patina. You can see a few stains from some beverage spilled on it once upon a time. The wood frame is old but so solid. One of the white pawns is missing its felt bottom, but other than that, the whole gang of pieces is aging like fine wine.

This got me thinking about the things that we design and create.

I’ve been playing a lot with AI tools lately (as everyone has) and have started to incorporate them into my design workflow. A lot of designers are terrified. I’m mostly excited.

I’m creating Figma brand guidelines that I can work on with Claude Code and complete in 10% of the time it used to take. I’m taking scratchy mockups to real, functional website features for clients shockingly quickly. I’m honestly sold. The business value is there for me.

The shadow side of AI is very real, though, and as is often the case, it is incredibly subtle.

We’ve all seen the obviously vibe-coded website. Someone sent me theirs the other day. Every section had that little all-caps eyebrow text with the really wide letter spacing. It was overwritten, and the animation and interaction was somehow too much and too little at the same time. The problem I had with it wasn’t that it felt low-effort, it was that it was trying to do too much.

A friend shared a famous quote with me recently from the legend Dieter Rams:

Good design is as little design as possible.

My experience in using AI to ship work so far has been that it’s just really hard to keep things from getting too complex when I have that much capability so quickly. It’s the polar opposite problem that I had when I made my first website with HTML. Then, I had dozens of ideas and didn’t know how to make them happen. Now, I can make almost anything I want happen, and that’s the problem.

The simple wood and leather chessboard has been beautiful for 100+ years, and it’s still going strong. It’s not yelling at me; it’s fitting beautifully into my life and adding character and joy and fun that people were experiencing before people had conceived of a computer. I’m not saying everything should last 100 years, but when I think about the type of design work I want to do I think of this chessboard: timeless, simple and beautiful.

In a sea of new capabilities and possibilities for shipping work, the difficult discipline is to ruthlessly simplify.