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October 21, 2026

3 min read

Mastery is earned through reps

Building has never been easier. AI can get us to a working version in hours. But mastery, whether in a craft or a product, still comes from reps.

I’m learning more, faster than at any other point in my life. Motion, physics, video, and code once felt specialized and out of reach. Now they’re at my fingertips, and I can learn them the way I learn best: hands-on.

That’s incredible. It gives me access to the work. It does not give me mastery of it.

The designers I admire have made thousands of tiny decisions about timing, weight, interruption, and restraint. They’ve developed judgment. They can feel when something is off and understand why.

AI can help me take more reps. It can’t make the reps unnecessary.

The first version gets you into the work

The Bubble Banner was one of the first things I vibe coded.

The early version was interesting, interactive, and polished enough to share. But I was still applying motion principles at a surface level. The bounce was cautious. The gravity felt like outer space. The individual decisions were reasonable, but they didn’t quite belong together.

Over time, I stopped thinking about it as a collection of motion settings and started thinking about the space itself. What is happening here? How should it feel? If the point is to smash these polished shapes and watch them fly apart, the motion should have more personality.

That changed the choices I made. The explosion needed more energy. The objects needed believable weight. The hammer cursor only appeared after I shipped the banner inside my portfolio and noticed what the interaction was missing.

AI helped me make the first version. Returning to it helped me develop a point of view.

Products gain depth the same way

Mature products build up an understanding of people and their workflows. Teams watch how something gets used, notice where the friction lives, and return with better ideas.

Look at something as familiar as saved places in Google Maps. First, you could save a location. Then you could organize locations into lists. Notes helped you remember why a place mattered. Sharing turned a private collection into a useful guide for friends visiting from out of town.

Each addition feels obvious now. Together, they show a product learning how saved places fit into people’s lives.

You can build any one of those features quickly. Knowing which one should exist, and how it should work, requires time with the people and situations surrounding the product.

Speed matters most when it gives us more opportunities to observe, decide, and refine.

Curation matters more now

When ideas and software become easier to produce, more gets made. That makes curation more important.

Designers still need to understand the person, the workflow, and the larger product well enough to decide what belongs, what needs work, and what should be removed.

AI may become great at the craft too. It would still need experience. Nothing develops depth without going through the work.

For me, that’s the real opportunity in this moment. I can get into the work faster, take more reps, and keep raising the quality of what I make.

Greg B design portfolio