Blog

Whatever your relationship with design systems, here's the uncomfortable truth: they've gone from a nice organisational bonus to an absolute necessity. And if your team is still building products without one, you're essentially assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. Except the instructions are also in Swedish. And someone's already lost three of the screws.

Product designers love to talk about onboarding flows, progressive disclosure, feedback loops, and user engagement. We attend conferences about it. We read books about it. We create elaborate Figma files documenting it. And yet, video games have been doing all of this, often brilliantly, since before most of us had email addresses. The games industry has been running the world's largest UX experiment for over forty years, and most product designers are barely paying attention.

A gaming platform that cost £5,000/month fell under its own weight. Years later, it's been rebuilt from scratch as vgdb.co, with AI assistance and a radically simpler approach. This is a resurrection story.

AI is doing to software what the printing press did to scribes. Creation is becoming cheap, fast, and accessible to everyone. The challenge isn’t building products anymore—it’s making ones that aren’t bland, copyable, or forgettable.

Something remarkable is happening across the world right now. People who have never written a line of code—accountants, teachers, small business owners, freelancers—are able to build an app. Not learning to build one. Not taking a coding bootcamp. Just... building one. With AI.