AI makes it too easy to add more UI than a product actually needs.
I recently finished The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson, and it pulled me back to a line I first encountered in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk: delete the part or process.
“Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.”
Elon Musk, as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (2023)
That principle resonates with a design instinct I keep coming back to.
When I build with Claude Code or Codex, or review UI generated by coding agents, I see a predictable pattern: they add too much. Extra labels. Counters. “Helper” text. Decorative iconography. More wrappers. More sections. The output is functional, but it is also noisy. You get an interface, but not always clarity.
One of the most common offenders is the counter above a checkbox group. Nobody asked for a count. In most cases, it does not help the user make a better decision. It adds visual noise right next to the thing the user is trying to scan. Delete. Delete. Delete.
Musk’s principle is an engineering heuristic, but design has had its own version of this for a long time. Dieter Rams said, “Less, but better.” Minimalist UX says something similar: irrelevant or rarely needed elements compete with what users actually need to see. Same truth, different language. Remove what is not load-bearing.
In the before times, adding UI had real cost. You had to think it up, design it, and build it. Now addition is cheap. The bottleneck has moved. Design judgment always mattered, but AI makes it more visible, more leveraged, and more obviously the differentiator. What matters now is not just generating interfaces, but judging necessity.
Lately, the designer’s role feels more editorial. We’re consultants. We clarify.
- What problem does this solve?
- Does it help the user do something better or faster?
- Is this signal or decoration?
- If we remove it, what actually gets worse?
A practical rule is to delete first, then add back only what reality proves is necessary. This isn’t minimalism as an aesthetic. It’s minimalism as a test of necessity. Remove until comprehension, confidence, or usability starts to suffer. Then add back the smallest thing that fixes it.
AI can generate interfaces fast. It cannot reliably tell what deserves to stay. That is still design work. In the AI era, one of the highest-leverage skills a designer can have is subtraction.
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