Reactions to “Product Design Is Changing”
I posted my essay “Product Design Is Changing“ earlier this week and shared it on both LinkedIn and Reddit. The reactions split in a way was entirely predictable: LinkedIn was largely in agreement, Reddit was largely hostile (including some downvotes!). Debate is healthy and I’m glad people are talking about it. What I don’t want is designers willfully ignoring what is happening. To me, this similar to the industry-wide shifts when graphic design went from paste-up to desktop publishing, and then again from print to web. Folks have to adapt. To quote a previous essay of mine from August 2025:
The AI revolution mirrors the previous shifts in our industry, but with a crucial difference: it’s bigger and faster. Unlike the decade-long transitions from paste-up to desktop publishing and from print to web, AI’s impact is compressing adaptation timelines into months rather than years.
Anyway, I want to highlight some comments that widen the aperture a bit.
“I Didn’t Sign Up for This”
Julian Quayle, a brilliant creative director I worked with a long time ago in my agency years, left a comment on LinkedIn: “So much for years of craft and imagination… I didn’t sign up for this.”
He’s right. None of us signed up for it. And I don’t want to be glib about that. There’s a real grief in watching skills you spent years developing get compressed into a prompt. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what it feels like to be proud of a pixel-perfect mockup, to care about the craft of visual design at a level that most people can’t even perceive. That craft isn’t worthless now. But the market is repricing it in real time, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
And to be sure, my essay was about software design. I’m sure there’s an equivalent happening in the branding/graphic side of the house, but I can’t speak to it.
(BTW, Julian is one of the funnest and nicest Brits I’ve ever worked with. When we talk about taste, his is insanely good. And he got to work with David Bowie. Yes.)
The Role-Stacking Problem
The most consistent objection on Reddit was some version of: “This is just companies piling engineering work onto designers.”
u/gccumber put it bluntly:
The idea that I now have to do the work of a jr/mid engineer on top of my design work… well that’s bonkers.
u/Top-Equivalent-5816 extended the argument:
If I don’t understand the syntax I shouldn’t be pushing it. And if I am learning and keeping up with current front end tech, I am not doing the UX work of requirement gathering, research, testing, sorting, charting goals, working backwards and executing. And if I am expected to do both that basically means I’ll cut corners and serve you nice steamy AI slop.
They’re both right about the risk. And I didn’t address it specifically enough in the original essay.
What I should have been more explicit about: there’s a critical difference between “designers should learn front-end engineering” and “designers should direct AI agents that produce code against a design system.” I’m not writing React by hand. I’m pointing an AI agent at our component library and telling it what to build—using the same vocabulary I’d use in a Figma annotation or a design spec. The agent writes the code. I evaluate whether the output matches the intent.
That said, the cynics are right about what will happen at many companies. C-suites will absolutely use “designers and PMs can ship code now” as cover for cutting engineering headcount and stacking responsibilities. u/gccumber called it:
The C suite is happy to have the perceived savings of rolling multiple jobs into one. But those savings tend to get erased by burnout, low quality, slower output, and higher turnover.
This has happened before. It’ll happen again. Companies that do this will ship worse products than companies that use AI to amplify their existing teams rather than shrink them. As I said in the essay, “Regardless of how many people or AI agents do the work, the work still needs to get done.” The process still matters.
u/wandering-monster made the business case well:
The AI is not a unique advantage you have, it’s a commodity. If you fire half your staff and your competition doesn’t, they can now go twice as fast as you.
Role-stacking will happen. The question designers should be asking is whether they want to be at a company doing it, or a company using AI to let them do more of the work that actually matters.
The Collaboration I Undervalued
u/mattsanchen reminded me that friction in process is sometimes a good thing, writing:
It doesn’t bother me at all to talk an engineer through my designs. They hold me accountable and are just as thoughtful as any of my other peers. It makes me sad to see all these pieces come out that make it seem like a burden to work with devs when it shouldn’t be the case at all.
I read that and realized my original essay framed the designer-to-developer handoff purely as waste. It’s not. The handoff is also a conversation—a forcing function where an engineer looks at your design and asks hard questions about edge cases, performance, and accessibility. Those conversations make the product better. Engineers catch things designers miss. The back-and-forth isn’t pure friction. Some of it is quality control.
If designers start shipping code directly—even AI-generated code—what replaces that accountability? Who’s catching the things that a design review in Figma would never surface? The answer has to involve getting engineering buy-in early and designers who understand enough about engineering to know what questions to ask.
The Tooling Isn’t Ready for Most People
Another honest comment came from u/The_Singularious on Reddit:
Right now, in my non-genius mind, the setup process is a fucking mess. And it is complicated to the point that making a “mistake” can set you back pretty badly… I am struggling to build a damn Thanksgiving dinner RSVP site with working two-way data integration. When something breaks in Claude or Cursor, half the time I don’t know WTF the problem is, and I can’t get agents to explain them to me at my level.
They’re right. The tooling is not ready for most designers right now. My experiment worked because I had prior experience directing AI coding agents and a willingness to iterate through failures. A designer trying this cold, without that foundation, is going to have a rough time.
Darren Bennett made a related point on LinkedIn: this works “for a certain kind of app and maturity. Companies with mature design systems can do this but for 0-1 the design role will be different.” Correct. My thesis was pretty broad. It will apply to each situation a little differently.
I’m seeing this at work too—there’s a ton of training that has to happen to get designers up to speed, comfortable, and efficient with these developer tools.
Where This Goes
So if the tooling isn’t ready for most people, the role-stacking risk is real, and the collaboration with engineering has value I underplayed—does the original thesis still hold?
Yes. But the path is messy.
Uijun Park captured it well on LinkedIn:
You can only direct as well as you understand. The better your foundation, the better you can orchestrate.
The designers who will thrive in this transition aren’t the ones who jump straight to AI code generation. They’re the ones who deeply understand design systems, interaction patterns, and user needs—and then layer AI tools on top of that understanding.
The skill floor is rising, and that’s genuinely scary for juniors. u/Repulsive_Policy1461 asked the question nobody has a great answer for: “WHAT DO WE JUNIORS DO WHEN NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE A CHANCE ON US?” I answered on the thread, and I’ll repeat it here: businesses need to decide to invest in their future, and then they’ll unlock funds to hire juniors. Until then, they won’t, because most companies are short-sighted. My actionable advice: lean into agentic coding to turn your designs into functioning code. Start in Figma if you want, but use Claude Code, Codex, or whatever’s current to turn it into an actual thing. If you can do this well, you’ll outshine many other designers who are still debating whether it’s coming.
u/susmab_676 might have had the sanest take in the entire discussion: AI is “a huge time saver. That allows me to spend more time on the details, and the why.” That’s the version of this future I’m working toward. Designers spending less time on production artifacts and more time on the thinking that makes products good.
