There's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. But for a decade or so, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most. Thankfully, AI coding agents have reopened the door.
Just like a sculptor needs to know how marble chisels, breaks, and buffs, a Web designer should know how CSS, HTML, and Javascript construct interfaces within a Web browser. You need to be intimate with your medium to know what it can and cannot do. Whether Web apps, iOS native apps, AI apps...
For years, many designers did exactly that. Looking at my personal GitHub history tells a story familiar to many. Steady coding until about 2014. Then almost nothing for a decade. Why?
Before 2014, a designer could build a lot with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Then React and Angular gained traction, and "web app" went from "pages with some interactivity" to single-page applications with state management, routing, and build pipelines. The gap between "I can code a website" and "I can code in my team's dev environment" widened fast.
Tooling got heavier and frameworks churned constantly. Deployment went from dragging files to a server to CI/CD and cloud infrastructure. So little wonder that a designer who coded comfortably in 2012 could look at the 2015 landscape and reasonably decide to go back to Sketch (dated reference, I know.)
Thankfully technology never sits still and AI coding agents are now collapsing the gap between designing and building. Zooming in to the last few years of my GitHub history tells that story well.
For years, it was faster to mock up software than to ship it. Designers stayed "ahead" of engineering with prototypes. Now AI coding agents make development so much faster that the loop has flipped. Henry Modisett described this new state as "prototype to productize" rather than "design to build," and that sounds right to me.
Designers can now work iteratively with production code, not just prototypes. This kind of hands-on work creates better designers, ones who work through issues that previously got left for developers to figure out.
As always, designing software is better when you work in the medium, not a level or two abstracted away. AI tools make that possible again.