How AI changed me as a designer, and into more than one

This site took me one day. A few years ago the same thing, my own portfolio, took me a month. That gap is the whole story of what AI did to me as a designer. A month to a day.

I trained as a UX designer. In school and my first internship I lived in Figma. When I rebuilt my portfolio I spent a month inside it, pushing every screen until it felt right, then shipped it through Framer. I knew a little code. Some Python, because everyone was learning it. A bit of p5.js, some HTML and CSS. Enough to drop into Framer when I wanted an effect the tool would not give me on its own. Design happened in one place. Making happened downstream, and I was only half invited.

Then Cursor shipped. The next time I rebuilt the site it took a week. I was barely in Figma, less than a third of the time I used to spend there. I thought in code now. Change a thing, watch it move a second later. I never decided to switch. I just looked up one day and the Figma days had thinned out. Fewer, then fewer.

The real turn was the day I put Claude in VS Code. That is when I stopped being only a UX designer. I started becoming a product designer. I write specs now. I plan the project before I climb into it. I still design. But design means something wider. It means the architecture, the build, the call on what is even worth making. The loop from what if to here, look got short. So short I stopped pre-deciding what was possible. I just built the small version and looked.

Now my main tool is a terminal and Claude Code. That is how this site got made in a day. And it spilled past interfaces. I started automating the work around the work. An agent writes my morning brief before I wake up. Another sorts and sources my photos. The dull parts of the week handle themselves. I get the hours back for the parts that need a person.

Be clear about the scope. I am not shipping production systems. I prototype. I build small tools. I automate daily duties, and I call them experiments on purpose. The point was never to become an engineer. The point is the wall. The wall between designing a thing and making it, the one I used to live behind, is gone. What stayed is the part I care about. I still think in systems. I still care about the messy human problems that do not have clean screens. People ask if AI makes design feel less like craft. For me it is the opposite. The craft moved up a level. Less time pushing pixels into place. More time deciding what is worth making at all, then steering the tools toward it. Taste and judgment, knowing when a thing is good, matter more now. Not less.

There is a harder question under all of this. I have not answered it. About a year ago I kept arguing with a friend who trained as an engineer. In the future, do engineers replace UX designers, or do UX designers replace engineers? Who learns the other’s craft first? Whose skills are harder to learn? Who holds the stronger moat against AI? I will leave that for another essay. What I can say is smaller. As an individual, I was not replaced. I picked up the engineer’s abilities instead. And I still do not know how to name where I stand in the market.

For a while I thought this was just my private workaround. Then Jenny Wen, who leads design at Claude, said it plainly: the design process is dead. The tidy march from research to mockup to handoff was built for a world where making was slow. Making is not slow anymore. When a feature can exist by the afternoon, you cannot guard a months-long discovery phase. You have to be in it. Building. Polishing. Deciding what is good as it takes shape. She is right. I watched my own process die and turn into something faster.

A month, then a week, then a day. I used to name myself a UX designer and hope the follow-up, can you code, stayed unasked. Now I say product designer who builds with AI, and the sentence holds weight. The wall did real work for years. Then it fell. I will not pretend I have named what that leaves me, or where it lands in a market that has not agreed on a word for this either. And I find I want the unsettled title more than a clean one. What we call replacement is really a redistribution of who gets to make the thing. So the question stays open, posed and not closed. What is a designer who no longer has to wait downstream?