South Africa, Sept. 9 -- I've stopped being surprised when a new AI tool makes last month's setup feel outdated. What still catches me off guard is how many designers are chasing the tool itself, as if fluency in one interface is the differentiator.

It isn't. It never really was.

With design tooling, we used to get clear market winners over time; Adobe, then Sketch, and InVision, then mostly Figma. Each one settled in, and we governed our process around what it could offer us.

AI tooling doesn't behave that way. We were deep in Figma Make most evenings until the tokenisation limits hit, scrambled into Claude, then started eyeing Claude Code, with GPT and Gemini running consistently in parallel. We ran weekly design jams just to keep pa...