I absolutely love Mad Men.

In part, this is because I’m a 31 year old white guy who likes to think I know more about shows & cinema than I actually do. It’s also because the idea of advertising fascinates me. It’s a convergence of art & business, psychology & spreadsheets.

The show follows Don Draper, a Creative Director in advertising who deals with what the show seems to argue is the seminal question of the post-war west: when will I have enough? There’s a whole theme there that I think cements the show as one of the best created in my lifetime, but I don’t know that you care about that.

Don is a mythical character in that he’s always chasing the perfect idea for a client, and he seems to find it in the strangest ways.

The show’s pilot has a legendary scene where he’s pitching work to Lucky Strike Cigarettes and has nothing. On a whim, with a disappointed table in front of him, he pulls the phrase “It’s Toasted” from something they were saying about how their product was made. The phrase differentiates them from the other companies, because when the consumer sees “It’s Toasted,” they’re not thinking “It’s Poisonous.”

Putting aside all the obvious ethical concerns, that’s a pretty cool move.

The other day, a friend of mine who’s one of the more anti-AI people I know asked if he could use Claude Code to build a website. I spent a bit of time showing him how to set it up, and he started playing around. Within a few hours, I got the text.

“This is pretty fun to use!”

I made fun of him a bit (or a bit more than that) for all his statements about how he’d never use AI for creative work, but it was an example of the shift that’s happened in the last 6 months or so with AI tools.

I went from using AI for a bit of help with contracts and the odd attempt at automation (that half the time didn’t work) a year ago, to now running coding agents on a near constant basis all day when working on client work. The usefulness is off the charts. I’m seeing huge gains on shipping websites, packaging up designs for clients, and getting internal operations work done with increasing efficiency.

All of this does beg the question, however: what does a designer do? And what do I do if my ability design is no longer valuable?

I’m not saying I have a solution for you, but one thing I am convinced of (and dare I say energized by) is that the job will become less about hard skills and more about your ability to create compelling, emotionally driven work.

What I’m not saying is that fundamentals of design don’t matter. Learning visual hierarchy, studying great design, these things are probably more valuable than ever. Some realtor with Codex (don’t mean to pick on realtors) probably isn’t going to create a great design with AI.

What I am saying is that we can no longer deny these tools are capable of shipping good work in the hands of a great professional at shocking speeds.

You can choose to embrace a scarcity mindset and hide, or you can ask “how can I tell compelling stories for my clients with this?”

Same circumstances, different mindset.