Hello!
Today I'm thinking about job hunting, specifically that the world you're applying for a job in no longer exists. There are remnants of it in bigger, older companies, but not for long. Why? Because the job descriptions most people are applying against assume a workflow that's already gone. For years, designers worked "out ahead" of engineering in mockups. Now development teams are "out ahead" of design, with new features becoming code at a furious pace, and design's job shifts toward making all that output fit together. At the Design Futures Assembly this spring, close to half of designers had shipped AI-generated code to production, and at the best teams the "stack" was dozens of internal tools that change month to month. Try writing a stable job req for that. So the natural reaction is to grab every tool and try to do every role. Designers pick up coding agents, developers spin up layouts, and everyone ends up here: That approach spreads us thinly across multiple complex and important jobs. I can play a developer on TV, but in real life I'm a pretty crappy one. The better move is the lesson we taught designers at Yahoo! years ago: double down on the thing you're uniquely good at and apply it elsewhere. So if you're looking for work right now, don't optimize for the job posting. Get hands-on with the tools, figure out what they can and can't do, and show how your particular superpower reaches further because of them. That's the job that actually exists.
How can I evolve my design skills to stay relevant as new technologies like AI change the industry?
Every big technology shift comes with a wave of "design is dead" panic. I'm old enough to remember people getting bent out of shape when the web arrived. Their lives were brochures, books, and posters, and how could anyone design with only 256 colors? The same thing happened when GUIs replaced green-text terminals, and again with mobile. Each time, the designers who did well embraced where the world was going.
So step one is simple: get your hands dirty. You have capabilities right now that didn't exist a year ago, and designers who aren't adapting are going to feel the ground shift even more than in earlier transitions. The worst thing you can do is hide in a corner and pretend it'll go away. Use these tools until you know what they can and can't do.
Step two is getting comfortable with a toolkit that never sits still. At the Design Futures Assembly this year, design leaders kept asking what the right stack was. The honest answer from people closest to the frontier was that there isn't one. Some of the best teams run dozens of internal tools that change month to month. And designers are increasingly building those tools themselves. Close to half have shipped AI-generated code to production.
That also means working in the real product, not just in mockups. The old PRD (product requirements document) to design to engineering handoff is breaking down. Teams like Perplexity "prototype to productize," and designers there work directly with engineers on prompting as a programming language. Here's roughly how I see that workflow playing out, with designers, developers, and PMs all building in parallel:
Of course, once anyone can ship code, the obvious question is: what can you uniquely do? My answer is judgment. That means deciding what should exist, what good looks like, and whether it's working. A lot of designers spent years designing for approval (getting sign-off from PMs, engineering, VPs, legal), and the muscle for pushing a point of view got weak. If your work is mostly following precise instructions, whoever writes those instructions can now hand them to an agent.
The other durable skill is humanizing technology. Designers should make emerging tech like AI accessible and understandable, and absorb the complexity so end users don't have to. It's the same lesson as web forms. Nobody wants to fill out a form. They want to buy the thing. AI just adds new versions of that problem, like capability awareness (what can this do?), context awareness (what is it paying attention to?), and walls of streaming reasoning text.
So start making things with the new tools every week, and rebuild your confidence in having opinions. Then aim both at bending technology to people instead of the other way around. That part of the job has been around since posters, and it'll still be around when we have holograms.