AI Design LA

A job interview is not where I expected to figure out what I actually think about AI and creativity. But there I was, answering a straightforward question about how I use design tools, and what came out was something truer than anything I’d written in a LinkedIn post. I told them about the joy. Not productivity, not efficiency, not any of the words you’re supposed to use in an interview. Joy. I make things now that I could never make before, and it feels the same way it felt when I was twenty-two years old gluing together an installation in a rented gallery in Osaka.

That surprised me more than it surprised them.

I’ve Chased This Feeling My Whole Career

The first version of it showed up when I was a kid making mixtapes. Not just picking songs, but sequencing them, timing the fades, thinking about how one track handed off to the next. Nobody taught me that. I just wanted to make something and give it to someone.

The web gave me the same feeling in the late 90s. I taught myself HTML, copy-pasted JavaScript I didn’t fully understand from forums and Geocities pages, and shipped sites into the world. It was the mixtape instinct with a bigger audience. I didn’t know it was the start of a career. I just knew I couldn’t stop doing it.

A few years before that, I was an installation artist in Osaka, teaching English to pay rent and renting my own gallery space for a few hundred dollars a show. Nobody commissioned that work. I paid to make it and paid again to show it. It never occurred to me to ask whether that math made sense. The joy of making something and putting it in front of people was the whole point.

Then came a career built on that same instinct, applied differently every few years: web design, branding, social apps, mobile products, even virtual art in Second Life. I was never chasing a medium. I was chasing the feeling.

I Built It in the Cracks of a Job Search

I felt the Osaka feeling again a few weeks ago, building the site for AI Design LA, a community some friends and I started here. The timing was not ideal on paper. I was deep in a job search, cycling through interviews and applications, and in the middle of it I took a road trip to Wyoming. The site got built anyway, in whatever hours were left over.

That’s part of the point. Job searching is a slow, low-agency kind of work. You wait. You perform. You wonder if the version of yourself in the interview is landing. Building the site was the opposite of all of that. My stack now runs research and thinking through ChatGPT or Claude, structure and visual design through Figma, sometimes with Make in the mix, and then Claude Code, in the terminal, for the actual build. Touch-ups happen back in Figma or back in Claude Code, whichever the moment calls for.

I took an idea, a name, and some new LA friendships, and turned them into a visual brand, a site structure, real content, and working pages with small interaction details I couldn’t have coded myself five years ago. Somewhere between my bedrooom in LA, a Wyoming campsite and the rest of the trip, that thing went from an idea to something with a URL. I pushed it to GitHub and shared it with the other organizers . One of them, Noel Saw, who is a great designer-builder, took what I’d vibe-coded and rebuilt it in WordPress using his own AI tooling, in a few hours. Watching him do it, faster and cleaner than I could have, wasn’t deflating. It was the same thrill as watching someone else’s cut of a mixtape you made, still yours, now carried forward by someone else’s skill.

The Fear Doesn’t Survive Contact With the Feeling

There’s a real and serious conversation happening about whether AI is hollowing out human creativity, judgment, and agency. I don’t dismiss it. I’ve spent my career watching tools reshape what designers actually do, and not every reshaping has been good for the craft or the people practicing it.

But I can’t square that fear with what I felt building that site. The joy wasn’t in prompting. It was in the same place it’s always been: the moment an idea leaves your head and becomes something real that another person can see, use, or share. AI changed how fast I can get there and how much of the idea survives the trip intact. It didn’t change what’s waiting for me when I arrive.

If AI were actually replacing my creative agency, I’d expect to feel less ownership over the work, not more. I’d expect the buzz to fade, the way it does when you outsource something you used to care about. Instead I feel more like the twenty-two-year-old renting a gallery than I have in years. That’s the tell. Not the speed, not the output. The feeling.

What I’m Actually Arguing

I’m not arguing that AI is a neutral tool with no downside, and I’m not arguing that every designer will experience it the way I have. I’m arguing something narrower and, I think, more useful: the presence of genuine creative joy is a real signal, and we should trust it as data, not dismiss it as nostalgia or novelty. When the making still feels like making, something important has survived the transition. When it doesn’t, that’s worth paying attention to as well.

I don’t know yet how the job search ends. But I know what happened on the road to Wyoming and back. I opened a terminal, and an idea a few friends and I had became a real thing other people could visit, use, and eventually rebuild better than I could. That’s not nothing. Some weeks it was the only part of the search that felt like me.

P.S. The site is live: aidesignla.org. If you’re in LA and building with AI, come find us.