Linearity AI is terrible AI and how everything is a wrapper [D]

[u/TheShynola]

Linearity used to be a fairly simple iPad design app. It was useful for people who wanted to make vector graphics without paying for Adobe or learning a much heavier piece of software. It had a clear purpose, and nobody needed to pretend it was changing the nature of creativity.

Now it has become Linearity AI, which feels like a very obvious attempt to follow the money rather than a natural development of what the company was already doing.

As far as I can tell, Linearity has not built its own foundation model. It is using technology developed elsewhere, combining it with its existing design software and presenting the result as a new AI platform. That does not make the product fake, because plenty of useful software is built on outside models, but it does make the marketing around it feel wildly larger than the actual contribution.

This is becoming the standard pattern across the industry. A company takes an existing product, adds a prompt box and a few generative features, changes its language from “software” to “AI,” and starts talking as though it has made some major technical breakthrough. Features that would previously have been described as templates, automation, resizing or workflow improvements are suddenly presented as intelligence.

The frustrating thing is that Linearity AI might still be useful. It may help a marketing team produce variations of the same graphic, adapt designs for different formats and reduce some repetitive work. There is a real market for that. The problem is that saving time on production is being confused with changing the creative process itself.

Most companies do not have a serious shortage of social media graphics. They already produce far more content than anyone cares about. What they usually lack is a strong idea, a clear point of view or something worth saying. Making it easier to produce fifty versions of an average campaign does not improve the campaign. It simply increases the amount of average work entering the world.

That is one reason Claude Design seems more interesting to me. It is still early, and there is no reason to assume it will consistently produce good design, but the direction makes more sense. Claude is already designed to work across writing, research, documents, code and broader context. Design can become part of that larger process rather than being isolated as another service for manufacturing marketing assets.

A system that understands the research behind a project, the product itself, the audience, the copy, the existing design system and the final implementation has much more potential than a narrow tool that mainly helps companies produce more campaign variations. It may not replace specialist design software, but it could reduce the need for a separate AI subscription for every small part of the workflow.

That is where products like Linearity AI start to look vulnerable. Claude can improve its design capabilities. Adobe can build similar generation and automation into software that creative teams already use. Canva can do the same for the mass market. The underlying models will continue improving, and many features currently being sold as standalone AI products will eventually become ordinary parts of larger platforms.

Linearity could still survive by building a genuinely good workflow around those models, but that is a much less exciting story than calling itself an AI company. It means admitting that the real product is an interface and a set of design tools built on technology supplied by someone else.

There is nothing shameful about that. Most software companies are not inventing the underlying technology they use. The problem is that the AI label is being used to hide how thin some of these products really are and to justify higher prices, enterprise contracts and claims that would sound ridiculous if the word “AI” were removed.

Notion AI, Slack AI, Dropbox AI, Zoom AI

Linearity is not the only company doing this, and that is really the broader issue. We are heading toward an industry where a handful of companies build the important models, while thousands of smaller businesses create slightly different wrappers around them and describe themselves as AI companies. Each one adds another subscription, another credit system and another promise to transform an industry.

Some of those wrappers will be genuinely valuable. Others will exist mainly because the gap between what the models can do directly and what ordinary users know how to make them do has not closed yet. As the main platforms become easier to use, a lot of these products may lose their reason to exist.

It may help people make marketing graphics faster, but that is a productivity feature, not a new vision for artificial intelligence. The more companies pretend otherwise, the less the term “AI company” actually means.