A rude awakening

I woke up one day and there was an announcement within the company I work with that everyone had to start using AI in their work. Claude Code had become so good recently that entire projects that would take about two weeks or more could now be done in an afternoon. While the biggest impact was meant to be seen in the churning out of code, it wasn’t long before the developers started producing frontends that looked pretty well-designed out of the box.

I lead the design team and it seemed like my entire team’s value was being questioned. When someone attacks you, the natural instinct is always to defend yourself. While I pushed back and pointed out the gaps that was in the outputs produced by Claude, (all true by the way), it was also clear to me that there was going to be a point in time when I would be hard-pressed to find issues with the outputs. The writing was on the wall: Adapt, or die!

The Democratisation of Authorship

So I took a step back and tried to figure out what’s going on. Engineers were building frontends. Product managers were producing prototypes. Designers were producing code instead of designs alone. There were even marketing people producing websites. But was the output produced good? No. But also, not yet.

I still remember the day when I first used a printer. I had to get word processing software on my DOS machine, I think it was a program called Word Star. I used that to write out “Welcome to the Fete!” in the largest font that was possible to produce with it. I then printed it out on this dot matrix printer that I got access to at my cousin’s place and I was amazed by the signage that got printed in about 10 minutes! It was exhilarating. Thinking back on it now, the banner looked pretty bad and it wouldn’t pass any graphic artist standards. But I think the excitement was largely driven by the fact that I could do all this myself without going to a specialist banner maker and paying him or her the “big bucks” for a banner that I couldn’t afford as a 7th grader.

I feel we are at a similar point in time today. The authorship of websites, applications and other software has become democratised. The incredible skill barrier that existed before has largely been taken down. Anyone who can manage to type, or even talk to a computer can now produce a website or an app if they wished to do so. Exciting as it is to see our ideas come alive, let’s be clear that only the baseline has been raised, not the top-line. AI tools at the hands of an expert within the field would produce much better outputs than someone who doesn’t have that domain knowledge.

Will we designers be restricted by the limitations of our old authoring tools like Figma? No, because we can directly work with code, in the browser or the device that we are designing for. Not emulated design surfaces. We don’t have to be bound by having to produce static designs that we have to imagine the motion for, we can see it come alive exactly as we intended. We don’t have to restrict ourselves to using certain formats of images because the tool doesn’t support it, we can use whatever we want. We can infuse voice capabilities, AI understanding and classification, whatever we can imagine. We don’t have to even to justify why an engineer needs to spend an inordinate amount of time on a feature that (in their minds) doesn’t add value. You could just do it yourself.

The Question of Taste

But the democratisation of authorship is a two way street. Designers can produce applications, but we’ve also seen that engineers can produce well designed interfaces as well. In fact, anyone can do so. What will set designers apart in the future then? “Taste” has been put forth by designers and I’ve made that argument myself before. But I’ve seen what’s possible with AI tools and don’t hold that position anymore, because taste is a learnt skill. And if it can be learnt, AI will learn it.

Interestingly, I saw this post on X recently that was written by what I presume was a developer. I think he wanted to warn vibe-coders of the various security issues that exist with vibe-coding and listed 20 things. The first comment on that post was someone who said that they fed his post as instructions to his AI bot! Learning for AI can be that quick. It’s incredibly flexible and can evolve really fast.

Is this something to worry about? Not really. As the head of a design team, I work with talented designers. Should I be worried that they’re good? No. I absolutely want them to be very good. If they are, I have to worry less about the basics and only need to focus on how to push ahead and make things even better. When working with new designers, I’d spend a lot more time getting them to fix basic issues. It’s the same with AI as well. If they become really good and develop taste, their capabilities just becomes the new baseline for human operators.

The Role of the Designer in the Short-Term

So after thinking through all of this, I changed my perspective on what a design team ought to be doing within a company. Our job has to be about making sure that the output produced by others are good. It isn’t to become the producer of the output. “Clock-building, not time-telling”, as in the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins.

I figure that we could be building the tools that make design available to everyone. If everyone can prompt Krea or Higgsfield and produce videos, the role of designers isn’t to get in the way of that. We need to make sure that the videos produced using any of these tools produce the best outputs even when the user is not a designer.

We can do this in a few ways.

1. By building the tools that produce the videos, banner graphics, icons etc. that the marketing or other teams need to produce.
2. By publishing prompts and style guides that could be used by others and bring consistency across authors.
3. By removing the unnecessary tools that require translation between design and production. Work directly with code that engineers are building products with. Plug directly into their Git repositories and work with code.

This is something that we can do in the short-term. But in the long-term we need to go wider. We need to become generalists and think beyond being designers alone. I’ve heard of titles like “Design Engineers” being thrown around. While that’s directionally correct, it’s probably just a stepping stone to a bigger disruption.

Beyond the function

Intelligence, labour and coordination has been human driven since the beginning of the human journey. With AI, that fundamental idea has changed. They can think, execute and coordinate faster and in some ways better than any human ever. This is going to change the nature of organisations if not societies.

Jobs that were centred around skill — the domain of “how” something is done will become commoditised. For instance, “I know Figma prototyping” won’t matter in the long run. AI will not only know how to do it, but I would even wager that most tools will not even be built for humans in the future.

But this isn’t something that should give us pause. Being a painter in the past meant that they’d create their own paints, starting from the raw materials. They’d make their own canvases, frames and a whole slew of other jobs. It was only after all this that they could paint and express what they wanted to. Painters don’t do that today. Most buy their paints and canvases from a store and focus on the challenge of the blank white space.

Our futures as UX designers or designers in the broader sense will probably follow a similar path. To the extent that the tools of the trade won’t matter. Those will be ubiquitously available and skill won’t be a barrier to anyone. The only thing that matters is what’s created with them.

We need to think beyond the function. We need to be more goal obsessed, the goals of the organisation, not our departmental or functional goals. We may approach everything with a design-first mindset because that’s how we’ve trained our brains so far, but that’s okay. I know it feels daunting, but we need to be able to understand that we have the tools to work with design, product, marketing or heck, even finance if it comes to it. We need to become generalists.

I think it’s only appropriate to end this article with my favourite Heinlein quote that I find rather prescient:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein