Frank Gehry never learned to draw properly.
While other architects mastered technical drafting, Gehry crumpled paper. Built little models that looked like accidents. His hands thought faster than pencils allowed.
When CAD arrived, everyone assumed architects like him would disappear. The opposite happened. Gehry used software to translate what his paper models already knew. The tool didn't replace his thinking. It amplified it.
The architects who vanished? The ones who only knew the old tools. And those that didn't took advantage of the new opportunities.
That's the part most people miss.
AI isn't replacing creativity. It's reorganizing who gets to create, and how. The programmer who treats Copilot like a curiosity, breaking its suggestions, testing its limits, using it to think sideways, builds different muscles than the one who just ignore it.
The drafters who survived CAD weren't the purists or the converts.
They were the ones who kept crumpling paper. Who stayed curious enough to ask: what can I make now that I couldn't make before?
Your industry is mid-transition. The tools are arriving faster than the playbooks.
The question isn't whether to use them.
It's whether you'll use them to think...or to stop thinking altogether.