For years, the leading computing paradigm was simple: What You See Is What You Get. We all learned the language of drag-and-drop, of clicking and nudging pixels into place. It was a revolution, but it brought with it bloated auto-generated code, rigid templates, the feeling of being creatively boxed in.
Now, something old is new again. The text prompt (once the domain of coders and Hollywood hackers) is back with a vengeance and powered by AI. This isn't a step backward, it's the start of a new dialogue with our tools, one based on a different premise: What You Mean Is What You Get.
The biggest draw of AI is that it can solve the "blank page problem." Instead of building from scratch, the creative process now starts with a simple conversation. AI tools are now generating polished app screens from a few lines of text.
But let's be honest: a chatbot is a terrible design tool. The initial high of generating something from nothing quickly gives way to the frustration of refinement and polish. It's the lack of immediacy. It’s the hour spent wrestling with a Midjourney prompt to get the lighting just right. It’s that feeling of "spooky action at a distance" when you type "move the button to the left" into a void, when all you want to do is move it yourself. It's powerful, but it's not fluid.
The future isn't a choice between visual and text. It's the seamless blend of both on an interactive, conversational canvas. This is where the conversation gets interesting, and ongoing innovation is most exciting.
This new workflow moves beyond a simple prompt-and-response. While tools like Bolt and Lovable generate interactive React components from a text description, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools enable agentic workflows to iterate and improve the output. The output isn't a flat piece of copy; it's live, functional code that a developer can iterate on and refine.
So, where does this leave the creative professional? It puts them in the conductor's seat.
The invention of the synthesizer gave musicians an orchestra at their fingertips. AI is that new orchestra. It can play the notes—generating a thousand options, assembling a draft—but it can't write the symphony. It has no taste, no vision, no understanding of the why behind the work.
We as creative professionals continue to provide that. The critical judgment, the strategic direction, the brand stewardship—these are the skills that turn a raw AI output into something resonant. This new AI workflow makes expertise more critical than ever, freeing professionals to focus on the higher-level, more ambitious work.