Tools got faster. Taste didn’t. The bottleneck on most projects now isn’t producing options, it’s recognising which one is actually right, a skill that doesn’t compress no matter how quick the tooling gets.
More options, same decision
Generating fifty variations takes minutes now instead of days. That sounds like progress until you notice the actual work was never “make fifty things”, it was always “pick the right one and know why.” Fifty options just means fifty chances to make that same judgement call, which is a much less forgiving position than it looks.
Where the real slowdown lives
The slowdown has moved from production into evaluation. Reviewing a hundred AI-generated logo marks takes longer, and is more mentally taxing, than sketching ten by hand ever was, because sketching by hand naturally filters as you go, and reviewing generated output front-loads all that filtering into one exhausting sitting.
What this means in practice
Which is a nice way of saying: the boring parts got automated, the hard part stayed exactly as hard, and if anything it now needs to happen in a more concentrated dose. I’ve started scheduling review sessions the way I used to schedule client calls, with a hard start and end time, because taste degrades fast once you’re tired.