Last week, per usual, I caught Claude making some weird shit. I’d asked it to build a settings card, the kind of thing I could build in my sleep, and what came back was… fine. Honestly, fine. Spacing right, nothing broken, nothing ugly. And I still knew, in about two seconds, that something was off. Before I could point at anything.
It took me a minute to name the feeling. Then it hit me: the dishwasher.
You know how you can tell when your partner loaded the dishwasher?* Nothing’s dirty. Nothing’s broken. But the bowls are stacked where the mugs go, the spatula’s pointing down, and you know, instantly and without evidence, that it wasn’t you. That’s what this card was. Clean work, loaded by somebody else.
(*I am the partner loading the dishwasher wrong, fyi)
The specific thing, once I found it: a hairline border-top sitting on a rounded box, so the line curled around the shoulder of the corner like a little smile. Tiny. Nobody files a bug about that. But no person drew it either, because a person would’ve closed the outline or squared the corner. The machine picked two popular defaults and never stepped back to see what they did to each other. (And before this sounds smug: I’ve shipped that exact curl myself. More than once. It’s probably on an old page of mine right now.)
Which made me curious what else I’d been waving through. So I started keeping a list.
So I started keeping a list
Artifacts, I’ve been calling them, because “mistakes” is the wrong word. (And, no, these aren’t the Claude-created artifacts). These are specific design quirks that are like, “Yeah, that’s janky.” They’re more like mannerisms: the little defaults the model stamps on everything it makes, the way an intern has habits, except the intern varies and the model doesn’t.
The pill on everything. Every label, every tag, every status word gets its own tinted capsule, until the interface reads like a pharmacy shelf. Chips are fine. Chips as punctuation are the giveaway.
The same radius on everything. Buttons, cards, inputs, avatars, modals: twelve pixels, wall to wall. Radius is a size decision (big surfaces can carry more curve than small ones), so flat sameness means nobody sized anything.
Sans-serif Sally. Inter, or one of its cousins, at default weights, for everything, regardless of what the brand sounds like. A perfectly fine typeface chosen by no one.
The card that started all this had most of the list going at once, which is why it smelled like the dishwasher:
It writes with an accent too
The writing artifacts are better documented, mostly because writers noticed first and got loud about it. The em-dash confetti. The zero contractions, which I think is the loudest one. The words nobody says out loud: delve, robust, seamless, landscape. The habit of writing in triplets, where every idea arrives clear, confident, and compelling. And its favorite sentence shape: it’s not about the tool, it’s about the taste. (See, there’s one now. They’re hard to put down. I pulled two of my own out of an earlier draft of this exact page.)
One of these on its own means nothing. Everybody dashes sometimes. Three or four in one place, though… that’s when the reader starts to feel like somebody sent them something they didn’t read first.
In today’s fast-paced design landscape, polish is not simply a finishing step—it is a strategic differentiator. Great teams craft seamless, robust, and delightful experiences. Let us delve into what that means. The result is not decoration. It is trust.
Okay, here’s the weird part
Somewhere in the middle of keeping that list, the list stopped being the point.
Because none of these artifacts are actually wrong. That’s what I kept snagging on. The curled border isn’t a bug. Pills aren’t a crime. Twelve-pixel corners are perfectly fine corners. Every item on my list is a reasonable default that plenty of people ship on purpose. So why do they bother me this much?
I think it’s this: I wasn’t reacting to bad work. I was reading WHO made it. Or more exactly, noticing that nobody did. Each of those defaults is a decision that never happened, and enough never-happened decisions in one place form a pattern you can spot on sight. A signature. An overconfident designer being like, “Yeah man. This is cool. I’ll add this, everyone is doing it!” Yeah, no.
So this was never really about catching AI. Wait, let me say that better: the artifacts are just the evidence. The actual subject is authorship. What makes work yours was never the pixels, it was the judgment: the hundred small calls that either got made by you or didn’t get made at all. The machine’s signature is what a stack of unmade calls looks like.
So when does AI actually help?
Here’s the version I trust, at least from my own desk: AI helps most when it’s shortening a trip you’ve already taken. If you’ve built a hundred onboarding flows, letting it draft the hundred-and-first is great. You move fast, and you still catch every artifact on the way through, because you’ve seen the right version a hundred times. You have something to compare against.
But take away that comparison set, and the same speed turns on you. You get somewhere confident-looking, fast, and you have no way to feel that the design is wrong… because feeling it was the skill. The screen ends up plausible and undecided at the same time, and you’re the one person in the room who can’t tell.
Where the comparison set comes from
Which raises a question I don’t have a tidy answer to: if the machine does the production now, where’s a young designer supposed to get that comparison set?
I got mine in 2005, mounting prints on foam core at 2am and animating my own name in Macromedia Flash. None of that work mattered. All of it made me stare at the thing I’d just made, up close, for a long time, and it turns out the staring was the actual education. Twenty boards a semester teaches your eye things the assignments were never about.
And to be fair to anyone early in their career: you didn’t opt out of those reps. The industry stopped paying for them. So the honest advice is annoyingly simple, and it’s the same thing I still do: generate the fifty variations if you want. Then look at all fifty. Slowly, one at a time, like you had to mount each one on a board before class. Nobody’s automated the looking yet.
Us? We’re fine
So no, I’m not quitting AI. It’s too useful, and honestly the whole arrangement is too funny: a piece of software imitating my job back at me with total confidence and no idea which parts matter. It drafts. I decide. It loads the dishwasher, and I quietly move the bowls back where they go and don’t bring it up at dinner.
Because that’s where this piece ended up, and it’s not where it started: the machine signs everything it touches, and I can’t turn that off. Nobody can. What I can decide (what you can decide) is whose name is on the work when it ships.
Sign it yourself.