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🎨 I Reviewed 10 AI Skills for UI Design and They All Ask AI To Not Be an AI

4 min readApr 12, 2026

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AI is not great at building user interfaces. I reviewed 10 open-source design skills to see if the community has found ways to fix that. What I found is a recurring pattern that says more about AI’s limitations than any single rule can fix.

Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I’m a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I share what I learn about design, AI-assisted development, and building products that actually work for people.

It is no great secret that AI struggles with user interface design. The core reason is that AI has no concept of what a human being looks like or how one functions in the physical world. It holds only a textual or visual representation of that reality. We use our eyes, hands, and bodies under specific conditions to interact with applications. That interaction process is too complex, and AI lacks any grounded representation of those dependencies.

Building good interfaces requires something I would call human experience: you need to have struggled with a poorly placed…

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

Founding Engineer | Staff Engineer | Engineering Partner for SaaS Founders & CTOs | Product • UX • Full-Stack