.png)
Over the past two weeks, I have been spending more time with prospective customers who are leaning solidly into our vision of "agentic modeling" (yes, I know - another brilliant marketing term).Couple of observations:
First: the computational design community is more energized about AI than I've seen it in years.I've been around this world long enough to remember the last few waves of "this changes everything" — VR, blockchain, the metaverse, parametric-everything. Most landed with a thud or stayed permanently future-tense. This one feels different, and you can tell because the conversation has shifted. People aren't talking about what AI might do for the practice. They're talking about what they shipped this quarter.
The more telling shift is who's building. For thirty years, "computational designer" meant the one person in the studio who could script. Now whole teams are writing little tools for themselves — not because they became programmers, but because the tools finally meet them where they are. That changes the politics of who gets to shape the practice from the inside.
What you feel in the room is a profession that spent a couple of years bracing for replacement and has come out the other side realizing it's been handed a new instrument.
It's the same shift design went through with each generation of better tools — only compressed. I'm looking forward to where it pushes the practice over the next two or three years, because the people I was sitting with in Brooklyn are not waiting for permission.
Second: people starting using a phrase— "vibe modeling." The flip side of vibe coding. The good version is real: professionals can try ten ideas in the time it used to take to draw one. The bad version is also real: clients are sending more slop their way, half-baked AI-generated renderings with the structural common sense of a fever dream, expecting the pro to make it work.
It's tempting to pick a side. I'd resist.
We've seen this movie before, and we've always come out ahead.
When desktop publishing hit in the late '80s, the design world panicked. Every receptionist with a Mac and PageMaker was suddenly producing newsletters with seventeen fonts and a clip-art handshake. The graphic design profession did not collapse. It expanded. Within a decade design was more valued, not less — because everyone had finally seen what bad design looked like.
When digital photography democratized the craft, the consensus was that "real" photography would die. Instead the floor rose, the ceiling rose, and a generation of photographers we wouldn't otherwise have heard of made work we wouldn't otherwise have seen.
The pattern is consistent. A tool lowers the barrier. A wave of mediocre work follows. The professionals adapt, the amateurs sort themselves into hobbyists and the genuinely talented, and the discipline ends up bigger and better than before.
Vibe modeling will be no different. Yes, there will be slop. Yes, more of it will land on professionals' desks. And yes — five years from now we'll look back and wonder how we ever practiced any other way.
More people in the design process isn't a threat. It's a shot in the arm. The pros who lean into it set the new ceiling.
Everything else evens out.Excited for what this community builds next.
.png)
