[[]]Design Isn't Dying It's Developing

I've been deep in the job search lately, interviewing for design engineer roles and getting back into the product creation and "sharing your work" communities on Twitter and Bluesky. There's a persistent note in those conversations that design is dying, designers are going to be out of jobs, and as someone who came into their professional practice as a designer and moved progressively toward engineering, I find that takes largely ridiculous. Here's what I actually think is happening.

The advent of LLMs getting better at basic design work is no different from photography replacing painters who were hired purely to replicate reality. Same shift, different generation.

Photography didn't end art the camera became a new tool. LLMs are going to do the same thing. You can get on or off the boat at any point, but the boat is moving. Designers who are embracing LLMs as a workflow tool are creating genuinely incredible things because they now have the freedom to do a level of software engineering that used to require years of school or thousands of dedicated hours. That floor just dropped significantly.

And it goes both ways. Some of the best design work I've seen lately has come out of engineering teams with no designer on staff. Yes, some of it skews generic but we're creating the conditions to raise the general baseline of design quality across products and tools, and that's powerful. We should be focusing on how additive that is.

In both cases, designers leveling up into engineering, engineers leveling up into design, we're expanding the available toolset and making quality more accessible. Yes, we'll also produce more slop along the way. But we've had slop for decades. Just because you hand someone a camera doesn't mean they're going to take a good photo, even with AI trying to help. You still have to engage with the craft. That's not new, it's been true for centuries. Knowing how to hold a paintbrush doesn't make you a painter. Knowing how to press a shutter button doesn't make you a photographer. This is no different.

We all now have an extraordinary new set of tools, and they're changing literally week by week. My own workflow has shifted almost every month for the past six months new tools come out, someone builds something I wanted to build and now I can just try it instead of making it myself. It's a genuinely astounding time to be a tool creator, and I think we should focus on that value rather than what we're supposedly losing.

All of this brought me back to a talk I return to whenever I want to reconnect with why I do this work: Why We Build, from the 2011 Build Conference by Wilson Miner.