[whstl]

They also very often don’t understand what’s easy and what’s hard to implement, what’s a real priority vs a nice to have, and have extremely strong opinions against off-the-shelf components and prefer building everything from scratch.

Also: The lesson of “don’t rewrite” from Joel Spolsky seems internalized in the minds of every developer, but "rewriting from scratch" is basically how designers operate by default.

Most of the explosion in frontend development complexity and amount of work in the last few years is because designers are inflating development costs and companies are eating it with smiling faces where complaining that developers are costly and wanting AI to fix the problem.

This kind of inefficiency and inequality in decision power is a huge thing in our industry. The same situation happens with QAs trying to play product and asking for modifications at the end of development that very often amount only to personal opinion and require developers to keep burning political capital to say no to.

I am not saying designers, QAs, PMs and developers should know everything, but when true collaboration doesn’t happen, due to personalities or political reasons, the result and the execution will always be lacking.

[yawnxyz]

really good observation, and it's interesting what will happen when implementation gets cheaper - designers will get overwhelmed with too many things to review now, probably

[whstl]

Good point. But TBH I was already seeing it, even in the pre-AI landscape.

Bad designers are a huge bottleneck and terrible gatekeepers of information, delaying the work even before the development starts, during and after. I saw this a lot in high-performance teams that had bad designers, but AI is making it even more clear now.

Good designers, on the other hand, know how to define standards and components, and have been empowering teams for quite some time. But of course this means there's less micromanagement and less reliance on Figma for every single screen.

What AI has really changed IMO is that there's no need for designers to ask developers to ask for micro-changes that take longer to explain than to ask an AI to do.

...but even that was already possible and extremely fast by simply having a designer pair with a developer and ask for changes on the fly.

IMO communication skills, organization and collaboration is what makes or breaks it, regardless of AI or not.

[joshuamoyers]

except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.

[16mb]

Those were never really that difficult to implement. The agentic way still requires proper communication, which is often what projects lack so I don’t see it changing much.