In a world of AI development, FEEL is the most important part of building an app.

I've been working as a mobile app developer for years now and with the rise of Agentic coding I've been thinking more and more about what the true value of my skill is now that an important part of building apps, writing code, is being shifted to AI. What I've found is simple and somewhat comforting. The part of my work and one of the parts I enjoy most, is crafting the User Experience, the layouts, the flows, the aesthetics, the animations and the FEEL of a piece of software. AI (and I think forever) is never going to be able to replace humans creativity, only offer tools to speed up presenting their human creativity and vision. It simply can't, design taste is singular, its deeply personal and built of years of experiencing and having an opinion about the aesthetics and functions of things in the world. AI models are trained on all perspectives at once, they mix all of the different colours into grey. A uniform soup that offers no new perspective or hand made appeal. When I build an app, I have a need to create something that solves a real problem, it makes me miserable thinking about design and building something that has no soul. For example I'm working on what I hope to be an elegant solution for a problem I often have (especially as a creative with ADHD). Let me set the scene, so I'm currently working on 3 pieces of software. 1) is an iPhone game, I'm building the game I've always wanted to play, its a resource gathering game where every single piece of artwork I'm drawing by hand (in Procreate). The game is a passion project and a reason to just sit done and make art (even if its just a tree or a rock), I have no plan to ever sell it, maybe I'll put it on the store for free if I ever feel its finished. I'm also building a bespoke iPhone/Mac app thats entire propose is to make it easier for me to develop the way I want, which is mostly away from my computer typing on my phone these days. So 2 apps, I'm pouring my heart and soul into the design of. No plan to be seen by any one but me and my mates. With all these wonderful projects on the go my brain storming sessions are electric. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. When I get in a flow the ideas are pouring out, "oh the guy in my game should have this animation when he turns around", "my coding app should have these buttons over here so I can quickly access that feature". And just as many ideas for the 3rd thing I'm building too. Now the 3rd thing I'm building I'm very stoked about it because it's so fit for purpose I use it every day. It's a thought capturing app that is designed to be effortless to pour ideas into. You speak out loud at it, saying anything and everything that comes to mind and this thing captures it all and intelligently creates todo tasks and summaries. The animations are honed to be silky smooth and main screen the capture screen, I've made a beautiful gradient of purple with super straight forward controls. The FEEL is fantastic and the way it collects my ideas and keeps them organised alleviates that ache I'd get from feeling like my hands couldn't type out my design notes nearly quick enough, that awful feeling of creative loss. Designing something to solve your own problems is a wonderful feeling and I don't think AI is going to take that joy away anytime soon.