Least AI in Practice: what it can and what it can't (and mustn't) do

Text is ink. Colour is a field.

This is the pseudo-poetic placeholder title that Claude Design chose for an example project when I tried to assess what it can and what it can't do in fall 2026.

Following up on this year's AI discussions, I have tried to find a way to use AI responsibly as a web developer: ethically, legally compliant, and ecologically efficient. Is that even possible at all? How can I put my idealistic principle of least AI into practice pragmatically?

A quick recap of the problems around the current LLM-based AI services: questionable data sources, possibly violating copyright laws; underpaid click workers traumatised by training and reviewing AI chats; data centers and power plants draining water and polluting the air to satisfy rising computational needs; money paid to American broligarchy instead of hiring and training junior developers and designers; feeding client-specific data to AI running on American or Chinese computers violating local legislation like European GDPR data protection; last, but not least, all of that to wait for AI to generate mediocre and buggy output that still needs human review and refinement.

That being said, AI can be very helpful, even more so as classic web search has been flooded with low-quality marketing slop, and documentation is often incomplete or outdated.

This is probably the most ubiquitous and unavoidable use of AI: doing a web search and following up on its AI-generated summary. Secondly, AI as "autocomplete on steroids", generating boilerplate code and applying it to a specific project.

Client-made Pamphlets

Clients, especially small ones, used to bring their ideas and expectations spoiled by advertising claims all the time. Now they can use ChatGPT and Claude Design, they can produce prototypes, brand and style guides that look quite professional at least at first sight.

Even wen we don't actively use AI as developers and designers, many of our clients will. So, I decided to put myself into their shoes and use Claude Design, Google LLM Notebook and similar services and see what they can do and what they can't.

It doesn't take more than three Claude Design projects to notice some similarities, like a color palette containing two colors named "ink" and "paper", although they are not necessarily the same tones in every project, at least.

As expected, AI tends to produce the most obvious result, while taking some of our requirements too literally and ignoring some others completely. Sometimes, the AI agent even claimed they had no access to the provided material or were not able to generate images etc. only to step back and do as reuqested after insisting.

Privacy

About privacy, most people didn't care much before AI, violating the law by sharing their phone contacts with Meta so they can use WhatsApp properly. People have been googling about sensitive issues, and now they share their personal problems, contact details, and client data with AI.

And if they don't do it, someone else will.

Maybe that's actually not really an issue with about 80% of our data. Yes, I know, companies gather big data, compile profiles and sell them to the advertising industry. Trouble starts where health and money is involved, and clearly when we share other people's private secrets.

In the worst case, this can damage credit ratings, raise health insurance costs, or even put people into jail instead of getting a visa to travel abroad.

We don't need AI for that, but AI amplifies the impact and speed of everything for bad and for good. AI helps hackers to exploit security vulnerabilites before patches were applied.

So, this should be the age of security and skepticism.

How come that it isn't?

What AI Design can and can't do

What that can do for clients? It can help clients to visualize and clarify their ideas. After all, it's not worse that what they used to provide.

What services like Claude Code and Claude Design can do for web designers and developers: it can show us the obvious, remind us of the state of art. At the same time, the results often stay behind the actual state of the art, using outdated concepts technologically, creatively, and legally.

Implementing our project, we can, again, use AI to speed up the boring tasks for the average parts, and focus on those aspects that only we can do.

At the end of the day, this is like asking several coworkers, and friends and family, about their opinion, to add to prior research and experience, sleep over it, and then assess that little snapshot of common sense and question where it falls short. Which issues did it miss? Which requirements did it fail to meet?

And, most importantly, which ideas and improvement we'd add as professionals, with our experience and intuition, to proceed beyond the average.

Conclusion: Will AI take Web Designers' Jobs?

Needless to say, I still believe, AI won't obsolete web designers. Are people less likely to hire a professional designer for seemingly easy standard tasks in 2027?

We have seen it with copywriting and translation already. AI can mass-produce mediocre slop, and it can replace junior positions for finishing valuable diligent chores, like writing documentation, or reusing a default design template for an occasional budget project.

However, accuracy and quality is below standard. Automated translations contain errors and awkward wording. Auto-generated text contains factual flaws, guesses and hallucinations.

Vibe code needs tests, guardrails and human review and refinement. And AI-designed visuals, at least in my experience, are usually mediocre at best, generic, uninspiring, and often miss out on important details that a human crative professional should have noticed for sure.

AI design tools keep reminding me why we need professional designers after all, and that I am not a professional designer, just a web developer focused on frotend, usability and devUX-collaboration.

So, if you're a fellow web developer or web designer, I'd love to exchange experiences and ideas, and I'm open to colloborating and rediscovering what it means to be human in the age of the so-called artificial intelligence.