Autodesigners on Autopilot
2025 Design in Tech Report at SXSW
Autodesigners on Autopilot: Where Human Creativity Meets AI Loops
- AI is not replacing designers but transforming how design is done.
- AI experimentation is becoming significantly cheaper and faster.
- The “Agent Era” is shifting AI from models to task-completing agents.
- UX is evolving into AX, reducing UI in favor of direct AI execution.
- AI UX best practices are emerging to improve trust and usability.
- AI automation introduces risks that require responsible governance.
- Human adaptability is key to thriving in an AI-augmented future.
In the quiet spaces between coding sessions and late-night bookmarking, I’ve been contemplating the invisible loops that now surround us. This year marks my 11th Design in Tech Report, and I find myself returning to a concept that has fascinated me since my first BASIC program in 1979 — the infinite loop.
10 PRINT "MAEDA"
20 GOTO 10This simple program, written on a Commodore PET, revealed something profound about computation that has now become central to our AI-augmented reality: computers never tire. They continue their appointed tasks without fatigue, without complaint, without the need for creative renewal that defines our human experience.
The LOOP, Rediscovered
We stand at an inflection point I’m calling “Autodesigners on Autopilot” — not about cars, but about how AI systems now place design processes on a kind of perpetual, self-sustaining cycle that impacts how we make things and how they behave and operate. Computation has always been surrounding us since the 90s, and operates in continuous loops, thinking and creating and refining while we sleep.
Back in the 2018 Design in Tech Report, when I surveyed designers about AI replacing their roles, many guessed “5 to 10 years.” We’ve now arrived at a point where we have started to ask this question more seriously, and what we’ve discovered is not replacement but transformation — or a profound reconfiguration of the creative mind and the creative eye.
Relatedly, in William J. Mitchell’s “The Reconfigured Eye” book from MIT Press, he documented how Civil War photographers physically repositioned bodies to create more dramatic scenes. The manipulation of reality through imagery isn’t new — it’s simply accelerated beyond our previous understanding of creative timelines. And that poses danger to all of us who consume media, as McLuhan once warned:
“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of their image, because the image will be much more powerful than ~he~ they could ever be.”
— Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
From Obstacle Course to Teleportation
The conventional user interface has long been what I call an “obstacle course” — screens forcing users through multiple gates to reach their destination. In our new agent-powered world, users can effectively teleport directly to their goal with a simple prompt: “Reserve flights and book a hotel.”
What happens to UX when the user can bypass 90% of your carefully crafted interface? This question will haunt the year of 2025 and beyond, and will challenge our fundamental understanding of software’s purpose.
The Four Spaces of AI Experience
As I’ve watched designs evolve through the lens of AI integration in the last two years, I’ve observed four distinct “spaces” emerging:
Chat AI UX Space — Beyond the basic chat window, we now see multi-agent conversations, partial responses with graceful fallbacks, and entire simulated societies unfolding in a single thread.
Document AI UX Space — Words themselves become intelligent, with contextual suggestions and knowledge graphs materializing within our familiar text editors.
Table (Spreadsheet) AI UX Space — Each cell potentially functioning as a small agent, handling translation, sentiment analysis, or fetching external data.
Canvas AI UX Space — Visual whiteboards where AI queries embed themselves in a free-form environment, blending human creativity with machine generation.
The Economics of Endless Thought
When I published “How to Speak Machine” in 2019, I couldn’t have anticipated how quickly its principles would become basic literacy. The three chapters I began with — LOOPS, LARGE, and LIVING — now define our relationship with AI systems.
What’s changed most dramatically is the economics. AI experimentation costs have plummeted. What once required significant investment now invites casual exploration. This affordability enables the “agent era,” because we can now sustain AI models running in continuous loops without bankrupting our projects.
As Steve Jobs predicted in 1984, computers are evolving from tools into “agents” — computational entities anticipate our needs. Forty years later, his vision manifests in ways even he might find surprising.
“Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as ‘agents.’ In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late ’80s, early ‘90s.”
— Steve Jobs in 1984
https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-jobs-1984-access-magazine-interview/
From UX to AX: The Disappearing Interface
What happens when the interface dissolves entirely? This is perhaps the most profound shift I’ve observed in the eleven years of publishing this report — the evolution from User Experience (UX) to Agent Experience (AX).
In the quiet moments between meetings and design sessions, I’ve been contemplating this transformation. The traditional UX paradigm assumes a human navigating through defined pathways, clicking buttons, filling fields, progressing linearly toward a goal. It’s a dance between human intention and designed constraint.
But in the agent era, something more ephemeral emerges. The interface becomes less a series of visible controls and more a conversation between intentions. I say what I want — perhaps not even with perfect clarity — and the agent intuits, clarifies, and executes. The medium between thought and outcome thins nearly to transparency.
I think of the first time I used a touchscreen after years of mechanical keyboards. That initial sensation of directness — of touching the digital object itself rather than manipulating it through intermediaries — was revelatory. The AX paradigm represents a similar collapse of distance, but now between intention and result. Not between human and computer, though, but between computer and computer.
This is not merely a technical shift but a philosophical one. When interfaces disappear in favor of direct “teleportation” to your goal, we enter a realm where what matters is not the journey but the arrival. The countless micro-decisions that once filled our digital experiences — which button to press, which menu to expand — fade into a single expressed intention.
There’s both wonder and caution in this transition. The wonder comes from the liberation of human thought — freed from the mechanical translation of desire into interface manipulation. The caution stems from what we might lose when that translation layer disappears — the moments of serendipity, the unexpected discoveries that come from navigating a space rather than teleporting through it.
The Bridge to Tomorrow
So designers are not being replaced; they’re being reoriented to orchestrate AI interactions and ensure human wellbeing remains central to our technological evolution. The metaphor of autopilot doesn’t mean humans do nothing — it means carefully designing and governing loops that never tire.
The future belongs to those who learn to harness AI rather than fear it, who see in these endless loops not a replacement for human creativity but an amplification of it.
In the silent space between keystrokes, I find myself returning to that first loop I created in 1979. The computer dutifully printing my name forever taught me something essential about the nature of computation. Now, decades later, that lesson has transformed our creative landscape in ways I could barely imagine then.
The LOOP continues. Design evolves. The conversation between human and machine grows ever more intricate, ever more meaningful.
And I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next. —JM
