So your designers debug your React code now when the AI messes up?
It's like a masterpiece painted by an artist with their nose 5 inches from the canvas at all times.
So a fashion designer can mass produce clothing? So an interior designer can build a house?
This designer should has never held.
For example designers and developers both use the computer as their primary medium of working. Their outputs resemble each other very closely, despite having a different underlying form.
Contrast that to the interior designer building a house, well those are different mediums. There is no efficiency gain from the interior designer designing the plan and also implementing it. Where as with a designer working in code there is one.
Fashion designers do indeed make clothing by hand, it's a very important part of their craft. This example disproves your stance.
That’s not what I said. There’s the problem. I said mass produce.
I want to be wrong because I'm watching the death of my entire career, but everything I've seen is pointing to this as an inevitability. We are shipping better and more secure code, and doing it easily twice as fast. Many development teams can be cut in half today with no reduction in output. I don't want to say it out loud at work yet, but we're actually producing too much.
Teaching programming is a bit of mostly solved problem, today anyway.
Is that bad? Not to anyone who has managed dev teams and is familiar with the incredibly tortuous and painful business of trying to corral a bunch of humans with varying skill and enthusiasm levels to create software. We have tied ourselves in knots with things like Agile just trying to work around the fact that software development is so slow and arduous.
Many times back in the waterfall days I have written up design documents to kick off dev teams on multi-week or month projects. Now I could feed those into Claude Code and get results in days. This stuff is exciting beyond belief in just getting shit done.
This is a golden era for any established company with an existing customer base. My question to them would be "with Claude Code, why aren't you carving through that massive backlog of feature requests that has been building up over the years?".
A lot of people seem to look at this as job threatening, and it surely is for junior devs. But for companies that already have a strong senior talent bench, it's time to raise the ambition levels and ask not how many jobs can be shed, but instead just how fast and hard can we go now we have these new superpowers.
It's a golden era for business, but the industry will employ many fewer people.
Every one of those transitions has resulted in more programmers - though not necessarily the same programmers.
I think we're about to cycle back to "custom code" except now it's for everyone, by AI - you don't need to find the to-do app of your dreams; you can code one for yourself in a fever-dream.
The era of "write Wolfenstein 3D in a few months and make millions" are gone, but they've been gone a long time already.
I've seen the "debugging" and "coding" that non-coding designers are attempting to vibe-code. 90% industry is definitely toast, but not the 90% you're thinking of. Most industry is going the way of Microsoft that cannot even display a start menu in under a second
I did not say anything of the sort.
"Designers" => "Design"
>Front-end, UX, design, and product have become one role.
Ok so, are your "designers" (now part of one role) not debugging react code? If they are then you mislabeled the question as leading to avoid discussing in good faith. If not, then you lied about the "one role" and it turns out that they haven't BECOME "one role".
This motte-and-bailey strategy is unproductive and disrespectful to the people you are addressing.
i.e. The OP doesn't need to answer yes to their question for OP's claim to be true, yet their question pretends otherwise. (non sequitur)
In response I suggest that the engineers using AI also lack code judgement (because they are not reading it either). I don't think questioning the AI use is the actual topic here, it is the shifting roles. Who says it's the designers that are taking the new meta-role? It's probably the FE's honestly.
The role shifting doesn't mean that it's the best path forward. I'm simply stating that it is happening.
Do you think it is reasonable to expect a person with an arts degree to know this?
Of course it is.
The only people who think your fucking college degree determines your knowledge level and ability are teenagers and people who are so deeply untalented that it’s the only way they feel qualified.
There are plenty of people with arts degrees who know this, and PLENTY of dogshit engineers with CS degrees who don’t
We've had a customer send us a prototype of what they wanted built with AI, and they don't have a college degree in anything. It followed our codebase patterns without any prompting, included tests, and all we had to do was wire up the backend.
Worth noting that you've slipped from "checking whether something works is easy" to "well, it's probably not as harmful as a very notable failure if it fucks up."
The bar lowers so quickly.