I trained as a designer and I've carried the title for about twenty years. Lead Product Designer, Senior UX Designer, Group Design Manager, Head of UX. I still love the craft. I'd just got pretty tired of the job.
In most senior design roles now, the job isn't really designing software. It's coordinating the design of software. Stand-ups, alignment docs, steering committees, a long Slack thread about the wording on a toast message. The bit that got me into this in the first place happens in whatever ninety minutes I can find between meetings. Most senior designers I know are somewhere in the same spot and most of them aren't especially happy about it.
Then the AI tools got genuinely good. Not the demo version. The version where I can sit down on a Sunday morning, describe a screen, and have a working React component by lunchtime. Where I can write a Postgres migration without going off to read the docs first. The distance between having an idea and having a working thing got a lot shorter.
That changed what I wanted to be doing with my time. If I can build a working prototype faster than I can run the meeting about whether we should build the prototype, then the meeting is the slow part. Deciding what to build got cheap. Being able to actually build it didn't.
Jenny Wen, who runs design at Claude, said a version of this on Lenny's Podcast recently, in an episode called "The design process is dead. Here's what's replacing it." She describes three kinds of designer going forward: the strong generalist who designs, prototypes and ships across disciplines, the deep specialist with real craft in one area, and the prototyper-builder who works directly in code. I recognised myself in the first one. The third is the one I'd like to become.
She also talks about the work itself splitting in two. One half is helping engineers take AI-generated prototypes and get them to something that actually ships. The other is short-horizon vision work, three to six month directional prototypes that keep engineering teams pointed the same way. Both of those assume the designer sits closer to the code than they used to. Reading it felt a bit like being given permission for something I'd already started doing.
Figma's State of the Designer 2026 report found something similar, with designers moving into what they call the messy middle and picking up work that used to belong to other people on the team. If you want the line between designer and engineer to go away, it's going away. That's been the pattern for a while now.
The specific reason this got me interested again is that I started out building. Sportal Australia, 2011, front-end work alongside the UX. I drifted into design management because that's where the org charts at big companies push you. AI didn't teach me how to build software. It gave me a reason to remember I already could, and getting back to it took much less time than I expected.
I'll also admit the less serious reason, which is that it's more fun. Designing in code, end to end, with the tools we've got now, is the most fun I've had at a keyboard since the Sportal days. The day job is still a senior design role and that's deliberate. But the practice, four fixed-price builds a year that I do myself, is where the energy is at the moment.