Geoffrey Huntley makes a claim that should bother every designer. He’s listing what isn’t a moat in the AI era:

Any product features or platforms that were designed for humans. I know that’s going to sound really wild, but understand these days I go window-shopping on SaaS companies’ websites for product features, rip a screenshot into Claude Code, and it rebuilds that product feature/platform. As we enter the era of hyper-personalised software, I think this will be the case more and more. In my latest creation, I have cloned Posthog, Jira, Pipedrive, and Calendly, and the list just keeps on growing because I want to build a hyper-personalised business that meets all my needs, with full control and everything first-party.

“Features designed for humans” aren’t a moat. Not because design doesn’t matter—because the implementation can be cloned from a screenshot. Huntley himself rebuilt versions of Posthog, Jira, Pipedrive, and Calendly.

Huntley invented the Ralph loop—a technique for running AI coding agents in continuous loops that ship production software at a fraction of the old cost. He’s been tracking the economic fallout for a year:

The cost of software development is $10.42 an hour, which is less than minimum wage and a burger flipper at macca’s gets paid more than that. What does it mean to be a software developer when everyone in the world can develop software? Just two nights ago, I was at a Cursor meetup, and nearly everyone in the room was not a software developer, showing off their latest and greatest creations.

Well, they just became software developers because Cursor enabled them to become one. You see, the knowledge and skill of being a software developer has been commoditised.

Swap “software developer” for “designer.” Anton Sten rebuilt his website and invoicing system without writing code. Édouard Wautier’s team skips Figma after the initial sketch and prototypes directly in code. The commoditization Huntley describes is already arriving for design:

AI erases traditional developer identities—backend, frontend, Ruby, or Node.js. Anyone can now perform these roles, creating emotional challenges for specialists with decades of experience.

“UI designer,” “UX designer,” “interaction designer”—these specializations made sense when each required distinct tools and workflows. When an AI agent can handle the execution across all three, the labels stop carrying weight.

So if the implementation layer isn’t the moat, what is? Huntley’s answer for business is distribution, utility pricing, and operating model-first. The design answer is adjacent: knowing what to build and what to leave out. Taste. Judgment. The ability to look at what Claude generated from a screenshot and know it’s solving the wrong problem.