Why Most AI-Built Products Feel the Same
You can spot an AI-generated image.
Not always from the technical flaws - the extra fingers, the impossible shadows. Sometimes it's technically perfect. But something is missing. The image has no point of view. No decision that couldn't have been made by a pattern matching engine trained on a billion photographs. It looks like everything and nothing at the same time.
AI-built products are starting to feel the same way.
The same hero section. The same feature grid. The same pricing table with three tiers and a recommended plan highlighted in the middle. The same Tailwind components, the same Inter font, the same indigo accent colour. The same onboarding flow that asks for your name and then doesn't know what to do with you.
It's not that these products are bad. It's that they're interchangeable. You could swap the logo and the tagline and nothing else would change. Because nothing in the build process required a decision that couldn't have been made by a language model working from a description.
The differentiation was never in the code. It was never in the component library or the colour palette or the feature set. It was in the thinking - the problem understanding, the product decisions, the hundred small choices about what this is for and who it's for and what it should feel like to use.
That's still human. And most AI-built products are missing it entirely.
The human touch in a product isn't decoration. It's structure.
It's the decision to remove a feature because it pulls against what the product stands for. The choice to use a word that's slightly wrong by convention but exactly right for this user. The onboarding flow that guides someone to the moment that makes the product click - not because a UX pattern says to, but because the founder has been the user for fifteen years and knows exactly what that moment is.
None of that comes from a prompt. It comes from caring enough to think it through, to push back on the AI's suggestions, to hold a vision long enough for the product to become an expression of it rather than an output of it.
The AI-generated image comparison isn't cruel. It's precise.
The technical capability is extraordinary. The output can be stunning. But without a human perspective behind it - a point of view, a reason, an intention - it looks like everything that came before it. Competent. Indistinct. Forgettable.
The products that last don't feel like AI built them. They feel like someone cared enough to build them properly, and used every tool available to do it.
That's a different thing entirely.
Steve Drew is the founder of ka-do - built for doing, not organising.
