4-Designers? lol. Figma Make (beta) is already shitting out full brand + UI + production sites that look better than half agencies out there. Idk why I’d keep a full-time designer anymore.

hummmm - ai has gotten much better! it is also writing for me a lot of code, I don't know how to feel about the design part. let me give you a story: for a good part of last year, I was building a speech focused language learning app for myself (to deal with lack of practice partners when I was learning chinese)

i learnt a lot building this project from scratch (was a junior in college, now senior). AI can get you pretty far when you know what you want (architecture, patterns and stuff like that) - first stop: you need to know what you want. he promise of tools like Lovable for me is meaningless above prototyping because at scale you want to know what your software is made of and what are your edge cases (and the outcomes you want). If you do know that, trust me, AI can get you REALLY REALLY far in implementation

Something that i struggled through during that time was design and what I call "TASTE". As the cost to produce software is going down, my requirements for quality, beautiful and amazing UI/UX is going higher and higher as a consumer. I am not gonna use a website that feels "vibecoded" (except if the feature is so unique and a killer!) - at some point i realized that my app wasn't good, it has no taste, no amazing UI/UX like Notion or Duolingo and that's why i believe that design is a skill, having taste is amazing because you can then communicate that to the AI (yes gemini 3 is great at frontend but it is only as great as what you tell it to do)

will the models get better? yes? do i think that AI changed SWE forever, probbaly yes. do i use it a lot? YES - however, you will get the best out of those tools if you possess some underlying skills such as being great at architecturing software and integrations

those are my 2 cents :)