Founders are scoring your AI answer.
There's a rubric for how senior your AI answer sounds. Here it is.
Founders are scoring your AI answer.
Most senior designers don’t know the rubric.
Seniority has one tell
It’s the depth of your answer when someone pushes. Ask an early career candidate about a design decision and you get the what. Ask a senior and you get the what, the tradeoffs, the second-order effects, and what they’d do differently. Same question, more floors underneath. For years that test only ran on craft. Now it runs on AI too.
AI is a graded question now
“How do you use AI?” is no longer small talk. It’s a graded question, and founders read the depth of your answer the way they read every other one. Here is the catch for strong people: you can be three floors deep on design systems and one line deep on AI, and the one-line answer is the one they remember. Depth on craft doesn’t cover for a shallow answer here. The market is splitting on that line, and the premium on the deep side widens every quarter.
Shallow answer, senior answer
Same question, two depths. One reads early career. One reads like the person they’re trying to hire.
How do you use AI?
Early career: “I use ChatGPT and Figma AI to move faster.”
Senior: “I draft research synthesis with a model and spend the saved day on the design. It’s strong on first passes and weak on taste, so I edit it hard and never ship it raw.”
What did AI change about your work?
Early career: “It made me more efficient.”
Senior: “It moved me from defending one idea to showing range. I bring eight options now, so the conversation is about direction, not my ego.”
Where does AI fall short for you?
Early career: “It hallucinates sometimes.”
Senior: “It’s confident when it’s wrong, so I use it where I can verify fast and avoid it where I can’t. Knowing that line is the skill.”
Notice what the senior answers share. Not a longer tool list. A workflow that changed, a tradeoff named, and a second-order effect on the work. Hit those three and you read senior. Name a tool and stop, and you don’t.
Where the depth comes from
You can’t narrate depth about a tool you opened twice. Every senior answer above is downstream of reps, usually some version of these, most days:
Draft the first version of anything written with a model, then edit it hard.
Sketch concepts in the conversation, not after it.
Pressure-test your own decisions against a model before the meeting.
Build one small tool a month you wouldn’t have built otherwise.
Hand your inbox triage to an agent, even a rough one.
Talk about the output you shipped, not the tools you used.
Do three daily for a month, and your answers change on their own.
What I’d bet on
Don’t just go deep on the craft. Go just as deep on how you use AI. It’s a graded function now, and functions get scored on the depth of the answer.
I made you a scorecard for the six reps. Print it, check the ones you already do daily, and work the blank rows next month.
In two weeks, Issue 4: the mid-year pivot. H1 is closing. What changes for senior designers in July, and how to move before the market does.
One ask. Reply with one line: on which question above would a founder score your answer early career right now? I read every reply.
Jeremy