I trained as a designer and I've carried the title for twenty years. Lead Product Designer, Senior UX Designer, Group Design Manager, Head of UX. I love the craft. I'd grown tired of the job.
The job, in most senior design roles in 2026, isn't designing software — it's coordinating the design of software. It's the stand-up, the alignment doc, the steering committee, the long Slack thread about which words to put in the toast. The actual designing — the part that drew me into this in the first place — happens in a ninety-minute window between meetings, if I'm lucky. Most senior designers I know are in the same place. Most are quietly miserable about it.
Then AI got good. Not the hype version; the version where I can sit down on a Sunday morning, type a description of a screen, and have a working React component on screen by lunch. The version where I can ship a Postgres migration without context-switching to read the docs. The version where the gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a thing" collapsed.
That collapse changed what I want to do for work. If I can build a working prototype faster than I can run the meeting that decides whether we should build the prototype, the meeting is the slow part. The leverage moved. The role of "person who decides what to build" matters less than "person who can actually build it" — because everyone can decide now; the deciding is cheap.
Jenny Wen — head of design at Claude — said this directly in her recent appearance on Lenny's Podcast ("The design process is dead. Here's what's replacing it."). Her version of the future is three archetypes of designer: the strong generalist who designs, prototypes and ships across disciplines; the deep specialist with extraordinary craft in one area; and the prototyper-builder who works directly in code. The first archetype is the one I recognised in myself. The third is the one I want to become.
She also describes the work itself splitting into two modes: execution support — helping engineers polish AI-generated prototypes into something that actually ships — and short-horizon vision — three-to-six-month directional prototypes that keep autonomous engineering teams aligned. Both modes assume the designer is closer to the code than they used to be. Both modes assume "building" is part of the brief, not a downstream concern. Reading it felt like permission for a thing I'd already started doing.
Figma's State of the Designer 2026 captured the same shift in a different shape — designers leaning into the "messy middle," doing more of the work that used to live elsewhere on the team. The boundary between designer and engineer is dissolving for the people who want it to. That's been the broader pattern for the last twelve months: senior designers becoming founders, prototyper-builders being hired faster than generalists, and the title "designer" splintering into a dozen more specific things.
What re-energised me, specifically: I started as a builder. Sportal Australia, 2011, front-end development alongside UX work. I drifted toward design management because the org charts of large companies pulled me there. AI didn't teach me how to build software; it gave me an excuse to remember I already knew how. The path back to the work was much shorter than I expected.
I will admit the unfashionable thing this is also about: it's more fun. Designing in code, end-to-end, with the tools we have now, is the most fun I've had at a keyboard since the early Sportal days. The day job continues to be a senior design role, and that's by choice. But the practice — four fixed-price engagements a year, in code, by me — is where the energy lives. That's the shift. The titles will catch up eventually. The work, for now, is the answer.