What Happens When We All Just Prompt UIs?

Tools like V0, Lovable, and Bolt are changing how we build interfaces. With a short prompt, we get full, working UIs—styled, responsive, even componentized. It’s fast. It’s undeniably powerful. But it also raises uncomfortable questions.

But...

The pitch is always speed. And sure, these tools accelerate iteration in ways that are hard to ignore. But I’m left wondering: what’s the tradeoff?

• Do we depriorotizing innovation in exchange for convenience?

• Are we drifting into a monoculture of “prompted design” where every app starts to feel the same?

• And if the output is based on scraped historical patterns… whose past are we remixing?

As a designer, I’m both excited and uneasy. Prompt-based workflows are a productivity unlock, but they can quickly become a crutch. Without intentional constraints, we risk generating safe, average, frictionless UIs that lack soul. Accessibility, clarity, and usability might be there, but not because someone obsessed about the details. Because someone prompted the defaults.

That’s not inherently bad. But it shifts what “craft” means.

We need to ask: are we evolving the craft or outsourcing it to a statistical model trained on whats already existing?

Because if every design starts with “Make me a modern SaaS dashboard with a clean aesthetic”… we might just be building the same thing, over and over again, in slightly different wrappers.

I know where I stand.

For a lot of use-cases we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Standardized patterns and components go a long way. But still sketching, ideating and iterating outside prompting is extremely important to find the best possible experience for users.