What's happening with design is quite simple. at it's core and at it's origin "design" has always been a holistic endeavor that one person drove. call this person a craftsperson, someone who is observer, synthesizer, ideation, designer, builder, tester, marketer, etc, etc. This was how "design" operated in a simple world. Design in products and services like everything was forced to scale as the economic opportunities grew and design needed to scale. fast forward to today we have fragmented roles across design, engineering, product, marketing, etc which is a reflection of a company's org chart. Scaling has diluting design and ushered in generations after generations of designers who really didn't understand and/or appreciate design as a fundamental practice. Scaling means "production" roles and with AI these product roles aren't relevant anymore. So AI is doing two things, forcing us to re-evaluation what design is and offering the opportunity for people to return to holistic design, leveraging AI's powerful capabilities to build as an expression of creativity, just like our ancestors did.

I'm largely with you. For years it was faster to mock up software than to ship it, so we split the work into stages and roles and passed things down the line. Now AI coding agents make development so much faster that the loop has flipped, and designers can work iteratively with production code, not just prototypes. That's your craftsperson coming back. Designing software is better when you work in the medium, not a level or two abstracted away, and AI tools make that possible again.

You're also right that production roles are in trouble. I was recently in a meeting where the backend engineer came in with a mockup, the product manager came in with a mockup, and the front end developer already had a working build. So should designers worry about AI taking their jobs? If the job is making mockups, then yes. That was never the hard part. The difficult work is, and always has been, maintaining coherency and intention across a product so it works for people.

Where I'd add a wrinkle: the scale problem doesn't go away just because one person can build more. When developers move from concept to working code 10x faster, you get lots of features that lack UX refinement and thoughtful integration into the structure and purpose of a product. More output means more fragments, and someone has to see the whole.

And honestly, most of the current conversation stops at individual empowerment. Designers saying "I can finally ship code, I don't even need developers anymore." Developers saying the reverse. But very few people are asking: how do we use AI to work better together? That's where we've been spending our time. The designer bakes in the design system, the developer bakes in the frameworks, structure, and deployment, and then anybody can come in and make something that follows the dev rules and the design rules.

So yes, holistic design is back. But the craftsperson's ancestors didn't have to keep a product used by millions coherent while a dozen people (and their agents) shipped into it daily. The designer who thrives now is the one who can build end to end and also shape the system everyone else builds within. We're more than rectangle creators, so use your brain, your intuition, and your whole self to solve real problems.