I made my first website in Macromedia Dreamweaver in 1999. Its claim to fame was an environment with code on one side and a rudimentary WYSIWYG editor on the other. My site was a simple portfolio site, with a couple of animated GIFs thrown in for some interest. Over the years, I used other tools to create for the web, but usually, I left the coding to the experts. I’d design in Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, or Figma and then hand off to a developer. Until recently, with rebuilding this site a couple of times and working on a Severance fan project.

A couple weeks ago, as an experiment, I pointed Claude Code at our BuildOps design system repo and asked it to generate a screen using our components. It worked after about three prompts. Not one-shotted, but close. I sat there looking at a functioning UI—built from our actual components—and realized I’d just skipped the entire part of my job that I’ve spent many years doing: drawing pictures of apps and websites in a design tool, then handing them to someone else to build.

That moment crystallized something I’d been circling all last year. I wrote last spring about how execution skills were being commoditized and the designer’s value was shifting toward taste and strategic direction. A month later I mapped out a timeline for how design systems would become the infrastructure that AI tools generate against—prompt, generate, deploy. That was ten months ago, and most of it is already happening. Product design is changing. Not in the way most people are talking about it, but in a way that’s more fundamental and more interesting.

Product design is going to change profoundly within the next 24 months. If the AI 2027 report is any indication, the capabilities of the foundational models will grow exponentially, and with them—I believe—will the abilities of design tools.

The AI foundational model capabilities will grow exponentially and AI-enabled design tools will benefit from the algorithmic advances. Sources: AI 2027 scenario & Roger Wong

The TL;DR of the report is this: companies like OpenAI have more advanced AI agent models that are building the next-generation models. Once those are built, the previous generation is tested for safety and released to the public. And the cycle continues. Currently, and for the next year or two, these companies are focusing their advanced models on creating superhuman coders. This compounds and will result in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, within the next five years. 

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.)

This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.

Part I: The Vanishing Bottom Rung

Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”

Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market? 

A tall man with curly, graying hair and a bushy mustache sits across from a woman with a very slight smile in a dimly lit room. There’s pleasant, calming music playing. He’s eager with anticipation to learn about his Outie. He’s an Innie who works on the “severed” floor at Lumon. He’s undergone a surgical procedure that splits his work self from his personal self. This is the premise of the show Severance on Apple TV+.

In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”

A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”

There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.

While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.

The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.

What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.

Last week an autonomous AI agent named OpenClaw (fka Clawd, fka Moltbot) took the tech community by storm, including a run on Mac minis as enthusiasts snapped them up to host OpenClaw 24/7. In case you’re not familiar, the app is a mostly unrestricted AI agent that lives and runs on your local machine or on a server—self-hosted, homelab, or otherwise. What can it do? You can connect it to your Google accounts, social media accounts, and others and it can act as your pretty capable AI assistant. It can even code its own capabilities. You chat with it through any number of familiar chat apps like Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and even iMessage.

Federico Viticci, writing in MacStories:

To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will appreciate.