Summary: AI lets teams build faster than UX can evaluate. UX can adapt by building shared judgment, accelerating evaluation, and guiding AI-generated designs.


We are entering the custodial era of UX . In this era, AI makes it possible to generate content, prototype , vibe code , and build working features much faster than before. This newfound speed is valuable, but it also leads to UX debt when teams haven’t taken the time to understand, evaluate, or refine their AI output.

In many organizations, UX is therefore encountering work later in the process: a prototype already exists, an AI-generated feature has already been added, or a workflow is already in production. The work is less about “designing from a blank page” and more about “deciding what from AI to keep and what needs to change.” That is custodial work. Luckily, UX is good at bringing structure to chaos and evaluating what actually matters for users, and those skills are important when production moves faster than traditional UX processes.

Ship Fast, Clean Up Later

You’ve probably experienced this type of cleanup work before. When teams move directly from an idea to a plausible-looking artifact and experiences are created through “vibes” or intuition, it’s easy to postpone foundational UX questions about user behaviors or whether features should exist at all. The result can be:



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