I've never been sure whether things are invented or discovered.
There are small steps that gradually reveal something that didn't exist before. A kind of particularizing induction.
For a long time, UX design assumed that creating meant defining a complete system from the start. Building the pieces so the solution would be coherent. Getting into tokens, components, and data structures to shape a closed whole that would then be refined.
But AI shifts the starting point.
Today you can test small, isolated ideas immediately. Solve specific aspects of a problem before the complete system even exists. Each experiment validates a pattern through direct contact with reality. It moves something from plausible to possible and, at the same time, enables it.
This doesn't stay at surface level. It seeps into action flows, functionalities, and information structures. For those of us who've worked this way, what emerges feels more like discovery than invention.
We're no longer designing a system from scratch. We're connecting dots so that, bit by bit, the system emerges and shows us what it needs to live and make sense.
Maybe the best products aren't designed. Maybe they're discovered.