> When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline.
These guardrails are precisely what should be laid down in advance to enable workers to run safely with AI. Write all the rules in your AGENTS file, and point your AI reviewer at it. Encode whatever you can describe algorithmically in commit hooks. This will get you 90% of the way there, and peer review will take care of the rest.
I am hopeful that AI will empower smaller companies, where there is less deadweight, and consensus can be formed more quickly. Discussing what to build is not wasted time; it's one of the few things that favors humans.
I did graphic and motion design for 20+ years and been doing full stack dev for the last 6. It's very difficult to do both and excel at - especially in the frontend space where things move incredibly fast. As you try to excel at one, you'll feel left behind in the other. Very stressful.
Fashion designers can, in general, work with fabric, yes. And an interior designer should probably have some idea of how to paint at the very least. To me with web design so much of what matters is encoded in the CSS and HTML that it is the final design product. Anything produced before is a sketch, a concept, but it's not a design.
For example designers and developers both use the computer as their primary medium of working. Their outputs resemble each other very closely, despite having a different underlying form.
Contrast that to the interior designer building a house, well those are different mediums. There is no efficiency gain from the interior designer designing the plan and also implementing it. Where as with a designer working in code there is one.
Fashion designers do indeed make clothing by hand, it's a very important part of their craft. This example disproves your stance.
React, Nextjs, Vue, Nuxt, and Angular are pretty much what AI is the very best at coding in my experience. Probably because they are all meant to build essentially the same thing with different curtains.
Ever seen a vibe-coded react app? It's astounding how well SOTA LLMs can produce good looking code in detail, but zoom out to the architectural or broader picture and it becomes an unholy mess.
It's like a masterpiece painted by an artist with their nose 5 inches from the canvas at all times.
I've been a developer for over 2 decades and I've been using AI in our react codebase for the past 3 months. Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast.
I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
I've been writing code for 50 years and it looks now that we have seen sunrise and are about to see sunset on humans writing code by hand.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.
Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
This is so context-dependent. Coding some generic crud app is indeed becoming more automated, but most of the stuff I end up building is just way outside the capabilities of current LLMs to accomplish without significant steering and gasps hand written code. Most of the stuff LLMs are good at ones hotting are the same things a non-coder could build with no-code platforms anyways. Which is great imo, it means we can utilise our skills and expertise on stuff that is more "cutting edge".
We're moving so fast that management can't keep up on reading what's happening, they're going to slow development down by cutting the massive cost of employing people. There just aren't enough features to justify the breakneck pace.
It's a golden era for business, but the industry will employ many fewer people.
AI is impressive but this same sea-change happened at least twice before - the era when computers went from being rooms full of women(354) to machines programmed in machine language(892) to those with screens, keyboards and even assemblers (assembly language, especially macro assemblers, were considered seriously high level at a time), to mid-level languages like C (considered needlessly complex and slow at one time, now considered barely above a macro assembler), to high-level languages like Java and even higher ones (arguably) like Rust.
Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.
But things really are different this time. Computers and software were nascent industries with lots of room to grow, lots of software to build in previous transitions. Today software and technology companies are the biggest in the world. Every industry uses software. Getting your web app, mobile app or game discovered is actually a huge problem today because we have so much software. There is not infinite demand for software, or for anything else, even if it seems that way in the early days.
The Olde Days were custom code for a business doing business things (only they could afford a computer, and some universities), then there was a Cambrian explosion of software sold by individuals or small developers to many (80s and 90s), then we've moved to large companies and SaaS.
I think we're about to cycle back to "custom code" except now it's for everyone, by AI - you don't need to find the to-do app of your dreams; you can code one for yourself in a fever-dream.
The era of "write Wolfenstein 3D in a few months and make millions" are gone, but they've been gone a long time already.
Or - there was a HN discussion on this half year or so ago - there's consolidation again, and there will be AI, but no code. Domain expert talks to the AI, perhaps with an expertised intermediary. AI spins up a whole new 'software platform' for the customer.. internally. Offers all the UI that is needed to work with it.. still 'in the cloud' i.e. in AI data centers. Customer happy, devs less happy.
AI isn't a technology that replaces programmers, it's a technology that replaces generic human beings. The manager of your agents will be an agent, too.
Realistically this doesn't mean all pure designers go away. Large orgs can have a small team that set the overall style guide and designs important pages, and the rest of the org just follows using AI to iterate.
That's the kind of question you will have to ask if you don't hire right. I get collapsing frontend/backend and PM/UI/UX but two then collapse code and product may be a bridge too far.
> Outside of some optimizations there's not much a designer couldn't debug through Claude Code. 90% of the industry is toast.
I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second
>A leading question is a query that suggests the desired answer or puts words into a witness's mouth, often guiding them toward a "yes" or "no" response.
>Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role.
Ok so, are your "designers" (now part of one role) not debugging react code? If they are then you mislabeled the question as leading to avoid discussing in good faith. If not, then you lied about the "one role" and it turns out that they haven't BECOME "one role".
This motte-and-bailey strategy is unproductive and disrespectful to the people you are addressing.
All right, here's a statement: your designers won't even know when the code is wrong. Just because it compiles it doesn't mean it's fine. They lack code judgment in the same way your coders lack design judgment.
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
Your designers are going to be looking at the layout; they're not going to notice if it's slow, uses too much memory, is not maintainable, doesn't follow repo patterns, etc.
Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?
"This works but the app is slow, can you optimize it." I'm not even kidding, most of the time this is all that's needed. Repo patterns don't really matter because humans barely end up looking at the code.
We've had a customer send us a prototype of what they wanted built with AI, and they don't have a college degree in anything. It followed our codebase patterns without any prompting, included tests, and all we had to do was wire up the backend.
> Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree
Of course it is.
The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.
As we know from THERAC-25, etc., comprehensively verifying that code works the way it's expected to is not actually very easy - it's perhaps one of the hardest parts of building any system more complex than a toaster.
Worth noting that you've slipped from "checking whether something works is easy" to "well, it's probably not as harmful as a very notable failure if it fucks up."
I have it as failover to Opus 4.6 in a Claude proxy internally. People don't notice a thing when it triggers, maybe a failed tool call here and there (harness remains CC not OC) or a context window that has gone over 200k tokens or an image attachment that GLM does not handle, otherwise hunky-dory all the way. I would also use it as permanent replacement for haiku at this proxy to lower Claude costs but have not tried it yet. Opus 4.7 has shaken our setup badly and we might look into moving to Codex 100% (GLM could remain useful there too).
I think it depends on the locale. I moved from SF, which is career oriented, to OH, which is family oriented and, as I expected, I found more kids roaming the streets.
So if your streets are deserted, ask the locals their views on parenting. Paranoid parents will talk up the safety factor, but it's overblown.
These guardrails are precisely what should be laid down in advance to enable workers to run safely with AI. Write all the rules in your AGENTS file, and point your AI reviewer at it. Encode whatever you can describe algorithmically in commit hooks. This will get you 90% of the way there, and peer review will take care of the rest.
I am hopeful that AI will empower smaller companies, where there is less deadweight, and consensus can be formed more quickly. Discussing what to build is not wasted time; it's one of the few things that favors humans.
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