What task still takes longer with AI than without it?
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I use AI every day as a Product and UX/UI Designer, and it saves me hours every week. But sometimes I spend 20 minutes trying to get AI to do something I could finish manually in 5. I am sure every profession has tasks like this.
What is that one task in your workflow where AI is still slower than doing it yourself?
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I'm surprised that writing the perfect prompt often takes longer than just starting the task myself. I've found that clear thinking still matters more than clever prompting, and AI only becomes fast once I know exactly what I want.
@yosun_negi Yep, agree! I think understanding the fundamentals of prompting can help a lot. You do not need perfect prompts, but knowing how to structure your thoughts and give clear context makes AI much faster and more useful.
For me, it is usually small UI adjustments where I already know exactly what needs to move. I can sometimes change the spacing, alignment, or responsive behavior faster by hand than by explaining it, reviewing the result, and correcting what the AI misunderstood.
AI becomes most valuable when the task has multiple dependencies or requires investigation. For very small, obvious changes, prompting can create more overhead than the work itself. The real productivity skill is knowing when to delegate to AI and when to just make the change.
@milan_cheeks Yep, exactly! As a designer, I have the same problem with small UI adjustments, and this is the main reason why I started this discussion. At the same time, it can also mean extra token usage. MCP helps a bit with providing more context, but setting it up and using it can also add some extra work.
I feel like very small coding issues often take me longer to solve with AI than if I just debug them myself.
For example, I recently spent two days trying to fix an error between my index page and my Google Apps Script using AI. In the end, I checked the code myself and immediately spotted the issue: it was just a mismatch between French and English. One part was using "activité" while the other expected "activities".
Sometimes a quick manual check beats hours of prompting.
@leond1 Exactly!