While this piece by Matias Heikkilä is from a developer’s point-of-view, it’s applicable to designers. He poses a conceit: LLMs are good at coding, but can’t see the bigger picture and build software. To be sure, Cursor and Claude Code reason and produce plans. I’ve given both fairly small products to build. Their plans look good, but when they try to implement, invariably they’ll hit a snag. They’ll confidently say “It’s done!” with a green checkmark emoji. And then when I go to run it, the program invariably fails.

Heikkilä, writing in his company’s blog:

There is old wisdom that says: Coding is easy, software engineering is hard. It seems fair enough to say that LLMs are already able to automate a lot of coding. GPT-5 and the like solve isolated well-defined problems with a pretty nice success rate. Coding, however, is not what most people are getting paid for. Building a production-ready app is not coding, it’s software engineering.