Chris Pollara in Perspective
When Creation Gets Cheap
AI made adding something new nearly free. The harder problem is keeping everything else coherent.
For a long time, adding something new to an application had a meaningful cost.
- A new interface meant design time.
- A new component meant engineering time.
- A new workflow meant figuring out how it fit into the existing product.
Even a small experiment required people to make decisions, build it and test it. AI changed that equation. Creating anything new can now happen in minutes. That doesn't just make teams faster. It makes the cost of adding something new dramatically lower. And when the cost of creation approaches zero, the interesting problem isn't how much more we can create. It's what happens to everything we've already created. Applications aren't built from isolated screens. They're built from systems.
- A component affects a pattern.
- A pattern affects a workflow.
- A workflow affects an experience.
And all of that sits inside an architecture that someone has to maintain. We're starting to see a different kind of productivity problem emerge. It's not whether AI can help us build faster. It's whether the system can absorb that velocity without losing its shape. We've been debating what that might mean for design systems going forward. Maybe one of their more interesting jobs isn't just helping us build what's next. It's helping what's next make sense with everything we've already built.