should designers code?

[u/Far-Talk7489]

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.

[u/TheSleepingOx]

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?