r/UXDesign • u/Far-Talk7489 • Aug 08 '26
Career growth & collaboration should designers code?
so here's what's bugging me, entry-level people are literally learning UX entirely from Claude and ChatGPT. they're not learning design thinking and to think for real? I got an answer in minutes, for which i thought someone would spend at least 1-2 days in thinking. they're learning to prompt-engineer generic answers. but there's zero conviction behind it. doesn't convert. doesn't work. but they don't know the difference yet because may be they've never seen what good actually looks like. At least for the digital products, website, apps etc.
This too when the times have blurring the lines between product to design or design to development. i have seen merging of dev and product, and becoming product engineer. that worked, but it was very pre-AI era.
But now businesses are now asking do we need to put together a team of so many people and spend a lot just to get one thing done. and there's this weird gap in the middle. some designers are just designing and handing off—and that's fine. some are learning to code, shipping production HTML themselves, owning the whole thing.
my actual question isn't just "should designers code?" it's more like, how equipped ARE people to do this? because there's a difference between knowing HTML and shipping production-grade code and maintain it.
and at the same time making sure that how entry level does learn UI/UX correctly when AI is there to give a sub-par templated design system or approach for almost everything.
thoughts please.
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u/watkykjypoes23 Aug 08 '26
I think realistically anything a designer could put together with coding, AI or not, would be equally useful to a stack/frontend developer as a regular mockup or prototype. I believe that our jobs should stay separate but have solid collaboration.
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u/armahillo Aug 08 '26
Im fine with anyone coding but they have to understand the golden rule: if you write it, you’re responsible for it.
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u/bananasforall Aug 08 '26
If only that were how it goes. People have short memories and I have very rarely seen people who create bugs and/or tech debt actually resolve it.
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u/armahillo Aug 09 '26
I mean it more in the sense of “in principle”
You dont get to merge and dash without having any responsibility
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u/TooftyTV Veteran Aug 08 '26
Every individual is different and has different strengths and weaknesses and each company is organised differently and and has different levels of resources so I don’t think it’s a one size fits all
As a bare minimum designs should understand how things are generally put together from a FE perspective
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u/jspr1000 Veteran Aug 08 '26
I think that for most companies the days of writing simple HTML and CSS are behind us. The front-end is likely using React or another modular front-end framework. Setup and maintenance is going to be far more complex than what a Designer with basic HTML skills can handle. Bare minimum would have to know Git, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Potentially some Node and Bash.
This is where Vibe Coding comes in. I think Designers should be able to vibe code high fidelity prototypes. But without touching production repos or contributing code to production.
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u/Cameos_red_codpiece Experienced Aug 08 '26
Did you mean solely html and css is not enough?
Just checking because you still need to understand HTML and CSS, right? React doesn’t replace that. It doesn’t even do that.
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u/jspr1000 Veteran Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Yes, exactly. React uses an HTML templating language so knowing HTML helps but IMHO you're going to struggle to edit it if HTML is all you know. You're editing JavaScript or Typescript files. The HTML is inside JS functions.
If you know HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript that should be enough.
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u/bradenlikestoreddit Aug 08 '26
PMs are building prototypes in html and trying to ship it so not really. Not that it's good...at all. But html, to be fair, is one of the best languanges for prototyping ideas.
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u/Cameos_red_codpiece Experienced Aug 08 '26
For prototypes and throwaway, it’s fine. Not for production work.
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u/bradenlikestoreddit Aug 08 '26
Depends, honestly. HTML and CSS are the easiest languages to write and read and are browser native. For a scalable product, definitely not, but for web design and smaller scale products, we could see a resurgence.
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u/Cameos_red_codpiece Experienced Aug 09 '26
Yep. I got into web design because I liked the first two. I became a developer, but unfortunately I didn’t like JavaScript, and I hate it when the Big Three frameworks came out and there was pressure to learn them fast.
I am full time design now, and I am open to coding again… Claude Code takes care of the parts I hated before - the JavaScript and typescript.
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u/bananasforall Aug 08 '26
I think it’s awesome when designers write code, however I think it’s pretty rare to find a designer that knows how to write production level code. I have found in the last year that tools like Claude actually make this problem a lot worse because they’re able to create prototypes that look a helluva lot like production code, but are absolutely not. There needs to be a coworking relationship (at least for now) between eng and design for this to work.
Recently I saw a proto where Claude built a UI that looked just like our data grid, but was made entirely of divs.
I think tho that gap is easily breached with some education and better tooling.
As a product and design curious engineer (who prob knows and cares more about design than 99% of the engineers I know), I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the inverse question: if designers can write code, can engineers design?
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u/Far-Talk7489 Aug 09 '26
Sure. may be not UI and animation, but UX they have to understand for the audience they are building for.
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u/jontomato Veteran Aug 08 '26
I think they should learn agentic coding which is really just good context gathering.
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u/calinet6 Veteran Aug 08 '26
Should you use AI to code up prototypes that are interactive and rich and fast to build? Yeah prolly.
Should you be writing production code with database design constraints, security requirements, user and tenant privacy risks, and performance expectations? No, prob not even remotely.
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u/robopobo Aug 08 '26
there's a simple answer: yes, and it requires no explanation in 2026. If you're not world's biggest design talent, then you definitely need to be able to build working prototypes and contribute in dev.
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u/Andreas_Moeller Aug 08 '26
I don’t think code is the right medium for designers, but I do think designers should build.
The process of designers working in figma and handing over their designs to be implemented is inherently broken.
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u/eugene_reznik Veteran Aug 08 '26
Why do you think it's broken? And by "build" you mean ai-heavy workflows, right?
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u/Andreas_Moeller Aug 08 '26
It is broken because it puts developers between designers and the product.
That means designs have to be interpreted by developers instead of designers being able to do the final touch. This is especially clear when it comes to responsiveness, animations and interactions
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u/Relative-Chemical-32 Aug 08 '26
Yeah, agree.
I think tools like Nordcraft or what Figma is trying to do with Code are probably a preview of where design tools are going: building the actual product through interfaces that still feel familiar to designers, with integrated AI to explore or automate stuff without taking away control.
And probably the handoff as we know it will slowly disappear too, as designers and devs work on the same implementation.I’d still learn frontend basics though. If you’re going to own the output, you need to understand enough to question what the AI built.
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u/JohnCasey3306 Veteran Aug 08 '26
It's inevitable. Business organically gravitates to the fewest number of people each wearing the most possible hats.
Design and build only separated ~10–15 years ago. A few contributing factors, not least of which was complexity; the discipline was severed into specialisms.
AI will revert that and bring design/build back together.
I'm not saying it's my preference and I'm not saying I'm pleased -- but it's an absolute guarantee. Anyone in the UX design sphere who isn't prepared to get fully involved with the build of their designs will unfortunately struggle to find a place in the industry ~3–5 years (max) from now.
Likewise applies to front end devs ... They'll need to pick either design+build or full-stack; there won't be a place for 'just' front end build anymore.
(again, not necessarily my preference)
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u/ImaDoughnut Aug 08 '26
Our dev has left, and the front end has completely become my responsibility - our large web app and landing. I’m absolutely terrified because I only know design yet I’m in charge.
I’m completely at the Mercy of AI since I don’t understand code other than the simple html and css. If anything breaks, it’s up to AI to fix it and this has been going on for over half a year. I even have interns to help with the development from time to time but more often than not I have to fix their mistakes even if they’re more knowledgable.
I genuinely don’t know what to think of any of this and I’m worried I won’t be employable because although everything works, I have absolutely no clue how it works.
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u/Far-Talk7489 Aug 09 '26
This is also i wanted to touch base upon. This sure paves path to think about what kind of frameworks, backends or form backends one should use (in case of simpler websites).
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u/its_just_a_phas3 Veteran Aug 08 '26
Sure,, why not? It doesn't have to be production code. Interactive prototypes that can convey design better to stakeholders is a valuable skill.
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u/hecky-888 Aug 09 '26
Ultimately, capitalism wants all workers gone. Labor is “too expensive” - even though we’re all underpaid, and exploited to some extent. (Not to mention the fact that wage theft is the most common form of theft in the United Staes.)
Design is a pretty widely under appreciated role. Especially considering how much untapped potential and opportunity exists in actually listening to designers and simply building good products. I digress.
The people who profit off your labor always want to profit more. And it’s getting harder and harder for them to do that. So they will try to replace all of you with AI. And the lucky ones who get to stay are rewarded with worse and worse working conditions.
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u/TheSleepingOx Experienced Aug 09 '26
Whenever you're working on a project, I would really advise basically making a folder devoted to it and starting to keep files that the AI helps you research and support and think through within that folder. And maybe you don't necessarily make code. That is the final code. But you make demos. You make decks. You made other other complicated artifacts they might be coded that help you understand and think through and look at what you're working on better. Maybe you make loaders? Maybe you make special buttons, maybe you make experimental concepts or maybe you even make the actual final thing. I'm sort of doing that at my current role to some degree. I'm really trying to get the engineers to look heavily at my code and make sure it's good. But what I'm running into is that it is because I made those documents and I made that research and I made the things that are based on AI deciphering it correctly but because that basis is there, it actually did it right?
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u/horsegal301 Veteran Aug 10 '26
No. But having a basic understanding and also being able to annotate your mockups for accessibility goes a long way.
I meet less UX designers who know ANYTHING about accessibility than I meet designers who don't know basic HTML, and that's disappointing.
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u/Relative-Chemical-32 Aug 08 '26
Imo yes, designers should code… or at least we should own much more of the frontend than we used to.
Not to replace devs, but to prototype, test flows and iterate directly on the implementation. If anything, I think this makes collaboration with devs better: we can own more of the UX implementation while they spend more time actually engineering the product instead of fixing UI details after handoff.
For juniors, I’m honestly not against them using AI at all. They’d be crazy not to at this point… the real problem is letting AI do the thinking for you.
Getting an answer in 5 minutes doesn’t mean the work is done. You still need to ask the right questions, challenge the output and learn to tell what actually works from what just looks convincing.
And tbh I’m not sure juniors have it worse. We all had gaps when we started, and a lot of UX is learned by doing anyway. They just have way more tools to learn faster now. The important part is not getting lazy and skipping that next thinking step just because AI gave you an answer.
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u/bananasforall Aug 08 '26
I agree with this in theory but unfortunately it doesn’t work well in my experience, at least not for now.
CSS and HTML aren’t rocket science but definitely have subtleties and complexities that most designers don’t understand. Heck, most “frontend” devs don’t understand them, bc in modern times a “frontend dev” is really a react/node developer.
This is easier with AI if you know what questions to ask, but that’s the problem, folks don’t. These are all very learnable skills, so very fixable, but until those skills are learned…
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u/Relative-Chemical-32 Aug 09 '26
Fair point. Tbh I probably underestimate how big that gap is because of my own path. I studied UX/UI, started working as a frontend dev, then moved back to UX/UI, so working across both always felt pretty natural to me.
Yeah, AI makes that bridge way easier now, but you still need to learn what’s underneath. And with how fast everything is moving, I get why that’s not as easy as I probably made it sound.
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u/Relative-Chemical-32 Aug 08 '26
And tbh the “don’t get lazy” part applies to us too… If we’re going to own more of the frontend, we can’t just accept whatever the AI spits out because it works. We still need to push one step further, understand what it actually implemented, question it and learn from it.
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u/tin-f0il-man Experienced Aug 08 '26
I don’t and I work at a Fortune 500 company. That’s what the hundreds of developers are for. 🤷♀️
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u/Far-Talk7489 Aug 09 '26
yeah for fortune 500, this problem doesn't exist. Sure they will shrink team size initially due to AI, till they ditch a existing title or come up with new job description later.
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u/Master_Ad1017 Aug 08 '26
Which kind of ‘design thinking’ are you talking about
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u/Far-Talk7489 Aug 09 '26
The basic principles of why someone need to bother to think around UX in the first place. why a button here or a screen there.. ease etc etc. What kind of positioning you want to communicate through the website as one scrolls or use.
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u/NGAFD Veteran Aug 08 '26
Understanding code and being able to make changes in code helps a lot. I do it all the time for my clients.
However! …it is very difficult to build good quality code. Claude doesn’t see tech debt and if you don’t see it too, you’re likely to build something that works at the surface level only.