"Make more." That's Autodesk's pitch for AI in design. Their tools handle the grunt work, you handle the thinking, and the result is… more. More iterations, more output, more designs per hour. It sounds reasonable. It sounds progressive. And it completely misunderstands what makes design valuable.
What happened
Autodesk has been positioning its AI strategy around augmentation rather than automation. The message: AI won't replace you, it'll help you produce more work by handling the repetitive, computational tasks while you focus on higher-level creative thinking. Humans stay in the driver's seat. AI rides shotgun.
It's a carefully crafted narrative — and one that's immediately complicated by Autodesk's own CEO, Andrew Anagnost, who's been rather more candid about the reality. He's acknowledged that AI is already disrupting jobs in animation and VFX right now, not in some hypothetical future.
So we've got the same company simultaneously saying "AI will help you make more" and "AI is already threatening creative livelihoods." Both things can be true. But only one of them is getting the keynote treatment.
Why "make more" is the wrong metric
Here's what bothers me about framing AI's value in terms of output volume: it treats design like manufacturing.
In manufacturing, more units per hour is genuinely better. Efficiency gains translate directly to value. But design doesn't work that way. The best design work I've seen — the work that actually moves the needle for users, for businesses, for culture — almost always involves making less. Fewer features. Fewer screens. Fewer options. The hard part was never producing more mockups. It was knowing which mockup was right.
When AI makes it trivially easy to generate fifty layout variations in an afternoon, the bottleneck shifts. Production capacity stops being scarce. Judgement becomes scarce. Taste becomes scarce. The ability to look at fifty options and know — really know — which three are worth pursuing? That's the skill that matters.
And "make more" actively works against that skill. It encourages designers to fill the space AI opens up with… more stuff. More concepts to present. More explorations to share. More options for the client to wade through. We've all been in that meeting where someone presents twelve directions when three would have been braver and more useful.
The real shift is about what, not how much
There's a broader trend here that's worth paying attention to. As AI drives down the cost of production across software, design, and content, value is concentrating in a very specific place: knowing what's worth making.
Some people are calling this "product engineering" — the idea that when building things gets cheap, the premium skill is understanding what people actually need. Defining the right problem. Framing the right question. It's not a new idea for designers — this is basically what we've always claimed to do. But there's a difference between claiming it and actually being good at it.