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Design in the age of AI: the death of PMs & engineers
AI & economic pressures lead to an inevitable future—one where Designers do more while PMs & Engineers may disappear.
“Should designers code?”
A question that has fueled spirited debates for years. Purists argue that Designers should focus on their craft — user needs, storytelling, and strategy. Pragmatists counter that coding empowers Designers, giving them more control over their creations. For decades, this debate hinged on whether coding was a necessary skill, ignoring the fact that coding requires a different manner of thinking than design typically does, relegating the code-writing-designer to an oft-ignored unicorn-like status.
But today, with AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot lowering the barriers to coding, the question has evolved.
The real issue isn’t whether Designers should code, but why shouldn’t they just…do it all?
As technology accelerates and roles converge, Designers and engineers find themselves merging into a new hybrid: the UI Developer aka Design Engineer (referred to subsequently just as a UI Developer). This shift is inevitable, driven by tools, efficiencies, and the forces of capitalism.
But beyond this shift to the foreseen future of the UI Developer, there is an even greater shift that can and will occur: the blending of Product Manager, Product Designer, and Front-End Engineer into a brand-new hybrid role: The Product Implementation Designer (PID). This same concept is also sometimes referred to as a Full Stack Product Engineer, or even a nouveau redefining of the Full Stack Designer, as several other authors have been mulling over the same concept in different ways.
In fact, a few years back in 2023, the Greyhat group predicted, in their post “The rise of the Full Stack Designer”, the inevitability of this conceptualized hybrid role[1]:
So what does it mean for the Full Stack Product Designer of the future? They need to leverage this AI to accelerate the design and development process, utilizing tools and systems that allow them to create efficient and effective…
