The rise of AI-assisted coding (vibe, agentic, etc.) is really putting pressure on designers and I don’t think it’s being talked about that much Let’s think about how software at tech companies used to be created, broadly: Some people would figure out what the next thing to build should be. Designers would produce concepts and narrow to the final experience. Engineering feasibility would be assessed, then the thing would be built, tested, and shipped to users Within this process is the expectation that Design Would Be Ready before Engineering Builds It because if not, then it gets messy, additional cycles are wasted, or engineers get sick of waiting and stop respecting designers and just ship whatever they want I’ve worked at companies where design had a few days, a few weeks, or a few months before Engineering Builds It, and obviously more time is better but that’s usually a luxury because screens need to get designed and approved as fast as possible But now with AI everything can be built instantly, all features can be coded by agents while humans sleep, and things that used to take a week to build now take less than a day, or less than an hour, or maybe built by the PM on a Saturday night So when do things get designed by designers? Well, optimally, everything that could ever be built has already been meticulously designed and thought about and iterated on and is just sitting in a Figma file waiting for the water to boil But in reality, Good Design takes time because it takes some thinking and talking and sitting with the problem and iterating and reworking and AI reduces that time a lot but it doesn’t drop it to 0 You’re probably already thinking that the solution is to have a comprehensive Design System that AI and AI-assisted engineers can reference and pull from, but the design of an incredible new feature cannot spontaneously emerge from a library of panels and buttons and toasts and color tokens because that’s like going into the fasteners aisle at Home Depot and expecting the architectural blueprints of your dream home to manifest out of a bucket full of nails PMs can use AI to figure out what to build next, engineers can use AI to build it, so everybody is just waiting on those Figma mockups that were due yesterday and when talking to my product design friends at big tech companies about this it’s clear that they are stresssssssed Leaders have a few options to mitigate this: First, they can bring designers in earlier and get them started concepting and iterating while The Idea is still being refined (the best tech companies already do this) Second, they can push for designer adoption of AI just like engineering has been pushing it. Give designers all the tools (MJ, Veo 3, Visual Electric, ElevenLabs, Krea, and a half dozen others) and hire consultants to give real world demos of how they work and how to multiply creative output while shrinking time spent I left the corporate tech world over a year ago, but if you still work as a product designer at a big tech company how are you doing? How have your processes changed? Are you staying afloat?