Design Thinking’s Blind Spot: Why AI Beats Whiteboards for Real Thoroughness

What I learned from mixing AI into my product dev workflows.

Why this stuff isn’t what it’s actually about.

I spent a month putting AI into everything, but this is not about that in general, it’s just about Fred (yeah that’s a picture of Fred below):

Picture of Fred and the dimensions he’s going to explore, methodically, one by one.

What started as a one-week experiment quickly spilled into four weeks of integrating AI into various workflows. Most experiments faded away naturally, but a few became indispensable. Among these survivors was “Fred the Feature Spinner,” a custom GPT I built to help develop product features.

Fred does one thing: it takes a feature idea and systematically “spins” it across six dimensions, generating twelve variations. Simple enough. But after using Fred weekly for over two months, I’ve made a counterintuitive discovery.

If you only have 5 minutes: here are the key points

• AI excels at thoroughness: Tools like Fred aren’t revolutionary because of their creativity, but because of their consistency and coverage.
• Thoroughness is costly: Traditional brainstorming involves significant time, coordination, and cognitive effort — AI…