The em dash problem, but for design

Saw a tweet the other day, someone called those little left border accents on cards “the em dashes of vibe coded UIs” and I thought that was a pretty clever observation honestly, laughed at it.

But then it sat with me weird.

Because that border accent has been in design systems forever. Government portals, airline apps, utility brands, stuff built by people who just thought it looked clean. It’s a solid pattern, does its job, nobody was complaining.

But now it’s a “tell.”

And I think that’s where it starts getting a little scary. We’re slowly building this catalogue of things that get flagged as AI. And once something lands on that list, it becomes hard to use innocently. Any human who genuinely likes that pattern now has to second guess it, not because it’s bad, just because it got claimed.

Vibe coding gets the same treatment. And okay, some of it is fair. There’s a real difference between building something thoughtfully with AI tools and prompting your way through without understanding any of it. But most of the criticism I see isn’t really about quality. It’s about smell. Does it smell AI? Then it’s sus. And that’s a weird standard, because smell has nothing to do with whether the thing works or whether someone learned something building it.

And I keep wondering where this goes.

I think we’re heading toward a weird place: people spending more energy making things not look AI than making things work. Designers second guessing good patterns, writers avoiding em dashes, everyone performing humanness instead of just building stuff that works.

“Does it work?” should be the question. Not “does it look like a human touched it?”

I don’t have a fix for this. But the cost feels real: good patterns getting quietly retired, not because they stopped working, but because they started signaling the wrong thing. At some point, that is not critique anymore. It is just a new kind of gatekeeping.