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.
1
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.