New Patterns Are a Tax

A design team for clinical software drafted two rules for keeping its product simple, reuse existing patterns and judge each design in context, from reviews that included AI-generated layouts.

Leonardo De La Rocha leads design for software used by clinicians, a product with twelve years of interface patterns behind it. Each new pattern is one more thing a clinician has to learn. He and one of his design leaders drafted two principles from what they had seen in design reviews, and plan to ask the other design leaders what to add.

• The first principle is reuse over novelty: reuse every existing pattern possible, because each new one makes people relearn the product.
• The second is to judge each design in context. The team had lost time debating an icon for an AI feature on its own, apart from the navigation and buttons around it.
• In one review, a designer showed three AI-generated layouts for a tracker built around a recurring deadline. A senior designer saw that the horizontal version looked like the product's clickable tabs, and the team chose the vertical version.
• De La Rocha asks designers to prompt AI tools for realistic flows shown within the whole product, not only their own part of it.

A design team can turn what it catches in reviews of AI-generated work into written principles. De La Rocha's team did this for one product, and its use elsewhere is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: The first 2 principles for what we're calling simplicity at scale came out of design crit, not a workshop.

28 September 2026: when agents build, people keep the first screen, the review, the files agents read and the whole product.