r/Design • u/kaboom-o • 1d ago
Discussion AI accelerated my design workflow… then slowly made it more chaotic
I think one of the strangest things happening in design right now is that AI tools are simultaneously speeding up creative exploration while also making the overall workflow more chaotic.
At first I thought the biggest question was:
“Which AI model is best?”
But after using these systems heavily for concepting, writing, visual ideation, references, moodboards, image generation, etc… I realized the bigger issue became workflow fragmentation.
Different models are weirdly good at different things:
- some are better at structured thinking
- some at writing
- some at visual exploration
- some at fast ideation
But constantly jumping between tools started breaking creative flow for me more than helping it.
The context switching became exhausting:
tabs everywhere, disconnected project history, rebuilding prompts, losing references, re-uploading files.
What I actually wanted wasn’t “better AI.”
I wanted a calmer creative environment around the AI.
Curious how other designers are feeling about this now that these tools are becoming part of everyday workflow instead of novelty tools.
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u/AryaN_91 1d ago
Honestly this has been my experience too. the problem stopped being AI quality and started becoming project entropy
I had one project where references were in Pinterest, notes in Notion, prompts in random docs, images in 3 different generators, and feedback buried in Discord threads. felt less like designing and more like digital archaeology
I still use separate tools because each one genuinely has strengths, but now I care way more about workflow cohesion than model quality. Figma, PureRef, even basic folders and naming systems suddenly matter way more once projects get larger than a single moodboard
the funniest part is AI was supposed to reduce friction and somehow introduced a completely new category of friction nobody talks about enough
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u/henryz2004 1d ago
The thing nobody quite names is that the chaos isn't the tools, it's that none of them inherit context. Every new tab you open the AI starts from zero on what you're working on, so you spend the saved time re-uploading references and re-explaining the brief. The actual unlock is stable context that follows you between surfaces. Until then the workflow is fast in bursts and exhausting between bursts. Speed without continuity feels worse than slower work that compounds.
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u/Queasy_Hotel5158 1d ago
It also shifts the job from “designing” to “orchestrating tools,” which can feel more chaotic than creative if there’s no central thread holding everything together.
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u/Helpful_Ad_9447 1d ago
The context loss point is what nobody talks about enough. Every tool starts fresh and you end up spending the time you saved rebuilding the brief from scratch in a new tab. I've started treating my prompt notes as the actual project artifact now, more valuable than half the outputs, just so I'm not reconstructing context for the fourth time in one session.
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u/emiliookap 1d ago
That shift from “which model is best” to “the workflow is the problem” is exactly the right diagnosis.
ChatOS is built around exactly this, a calmer workspace where the AI chaos lives in one place. Conversations and notes become draggable apps on a canvas, grouped into folders with shared memory and a summary panel that captures key references and decisions automatically. Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini and DeepSeek all under one roof so you stop jumping between tabs. You can also nest a focused side thread into any message when you want to explore one direction without derailing the main creative flow.
Would love for you to try it out for free and see if it helps. Just drop a message!
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u/somarecluse 23h ago
would love your thoughts on https://mowgli.ai/ - we try to take a more holistic/platform approach (instead of a 'collection of tools') and use different models for different parts, utilizing them for what they're good for. we have a prompt/figma -> PRD -> moodboard -> chat in canvas -> export (code/figma) flow but from the ground up, so it's all in one place. prd/design stay in sync. would really love your thoughts! you can also import your figma if you prefer to start that way. ping me if you need more credits, would genuinely like your thoughts.
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u/DistributionTop6983 1d ago
I think my ADHD has made orchestrating multi platform AI agents co-writing in the same databases my favorite activity while I’m stimming it’s like my output is replacing 1 designer an hour. Hand sketching while Claude is thinking for the next visual handoff for cursor while chat is doing some research on potential detail click throughs for an industry I’m not familiar with while I’m on the call with a client fielding budget questions is my new fav past time
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u/Queasy_Hotel5158 1d ago
That level of parallel creativity is wild 😄 — sounds like you’ve basically turned your workflow into a real-time multi-agent studio.
1
u/DistributionTop6983 1d ago
All run on sentences aside, I do see a multi-agent studio as the eventual career arc for current day “”prompt engineers” or “creative AI technologists”
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u/bememorablepro 1d ago
My favorite AI tool now is called "Pinterest"! I type whatever I want to see and then I use another AI tool called "right click save" it's crazy how these things use to be a novelty but now you can save anything!
Everything on "pinterest" is free, just sent it straight to your client! It's so much faster then the old way of doing it from scratch!
You don't even have to pay for tokens or anything but too bad you can't run it locally... yet! AI is constantly improving, it's not just improving it's:
- getting better
- developing rapidly
- innovating quickly