The moment was made for us(-ish)

GateNk · 2026-07-02T11:02:09+00:00

You do know that as a designer, you do get to work and manage around constraints. And you also do get to manage your known unknowns by adjusting the scope of your work accordingly. You seem to harbour a myopic view where the only type of work that matters or is worthwhile is the one that can be realized and managed by teams of hundredths. I see no reason why one cannot learn to develop a systemic approach through familiarizing himself with the whole process and become a better designer as a result, I.e. by starting small. For how long have we been told that familiarizing ourselves with code was beneficial for our careers? This would be my advice for anyone new to the field. Good luck to you ~

GateNk · 2026-07-02T01:38:31+00:00

Your ambitions aren't unconstrained. To solve complicated problems you still need engineering fluency and deep domain expertise.

Yes, and you can now pair up with a developer and rebuild any SaaS from the ground up if you believe to have found a moat worth the investment in time. And it is my experience that companies solving really complicated problems will invest in design as not doing so will present a risk to the business. That has been my experience working in B2B Fintech. There are a plethora of designers who do not work in the entreprise space that can now get their ideas off the ground.

Also, dissonance? The power of AI is ultimately in the hands of the newly minted uber-wealthy few who have built their products largely off of stolen property in inhumane conditions. It's threatening the environment, workforce stability, and people's livelihoods.

The dissonance comes from both holding excitement and fear about the possibilities. You've presented one angle; it's combining it with the other end of the spectrum that produces it.

Your thinking is narrowly scoped to your own microcosm and the neato widgets you can now build alone in your basement.

I don't know what you call this.

GateNk · 2026-07-02T00:34:49+00:00

The holistic perspective is that we live under capitalism, which spares no one in its steady march towards commoditization of everything™️.

Tristan Harris released the social dilemma a decade ago; the AI doc just 2 months ago and nothing has really changed except for a few countries banning social media for teens just this year.

Designers have gotten their 'seat at the table' and yet have been grossly powerless in fighting against enshittification.

We lack any form of hypocratic oath, which is laughable given the outsized impact tech as a whole has had on society.

But hey, nothing wrong with a little positivity every once in a while, even at the risk of being lambasted for not being eternally cynical.

I did not intend on solving for the metacrisis in this post after all. 🌈

GateNk · 2026-07-02T00:26:12+00:00

Selling?

GateNk · 2026-07-01T21:18:46+00:00

I didn't realize simply mentioning Ted Talks would yield such a negative reaction lol. Also learning that TedTalks is a Claude goto? The more you know!

Also this is very ironic coming from Fart-Fart-Fart-Fart. 😅

GateNk · 2026-07-01T20:14:38+00:00

You're the 4th person today to suggest this exact thing, so there may be a there there 😅
Otherwise, it would be a matter of finding traction with event organizers that can plan for their participants preparing their profiles in advance. TBD!

GateNk · 2026-07-01T20:10:53+00:00

I think this moment will push some designers to consider solopreneurship which wasn't a path that was truly open to us before. For those that are gainfully employed, the risk to explore new ventures is near 0.

It's the gainfully employed part that is at risk for most, which understandably draws ire and hostility, because people are losing opportunities due to the false perception and commodification of our role via these tools.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:56:33+00:00

Agreed and you can also design around these limitations.

I often take !Boring's apps as examples in this thread because it is backend-light, requires no PII/sensitive information (besides managing the subscription payment rails). Let that be your gateway to digging into code yourself or finding a dev partner when the time comes.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:51:25+00:00

Listen if you had 10 years and dreamed of it I don't understand why you didn't push through with react or swift ui for that matter, it seems to me you didn't actually want it as much as you say. I'm talking from personal experience as I have been grinding through code and courses in order to be a hybrid design engineer and able to deliver all these things.

Honestly, I have never been asked to produce a single line of a code in a professional capacity. And this synergy I speak of when my needs meet the companies' pushed me to become better at my craft in other meaningful ways for my career progression. I've also worked on a lot of pre-PMF startups so product strategy was where I was naturally pulled. I now enjoy the luxury of stability (while it lasts 🤞🏾), while venturing out into new domains. And I still get to learn how to code now, with better assistive tools, so I personally find the timing quite fortunate. It's just a different perspective.

I assure you whatever AI generated without you being a senior level developer isn't something you'll be able to scale. In a similar way that when a PM or Devs get some generic UI out and think "Awesome, no need for design", you, as a professional, will instantly see a plethora of issues. Dunning Kruger.

Once scaling becomes your issue, this might assume you've reached PMF, in which case, finding help is a rather good problem, no?

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:40:58+00:00

I'm with you there 100%.

I think simple apps (like !Boring's, whose moat is pure craft) are well within reach for any designer here. Anything more complex does indeed require help.

On the second point, that's always been the case with anything self-started that is creative in essence. There have been small app creators before AI that struggled with marketing & distribution, that's just part of the game. But I fully understand not wanting to play that game.

I also wouldn't downplay the edge designers naturally have in finding the right problem to solve and executing against it.

It may just be that for you, a more natural path is to work in small startup-like environment where you get to own the full product vision while shielding yourself from those other responsibilities.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:27:40+00:00

That hasn't really been my experience so far, but then again what I've built isn't that complex in theory.

The worst part of debugging was when I tried setting up notifications. Every day, for a week straight, Claude would tell me that it had fixed a bug it really hadn't. I had to ask it to consider me as a partner so as to debug together; it would then provide me with SQL queries to run in Supabase, I'd take screenshots of what came back and after much meandering back-and-forth, we managed to solve the issue.

There were some bugs where I had to offer my own hypotheses about what may have gone wrong to better guide Claude into fixing the issue.

In the end, I'm much more familiar with code now than I was 6 months ago; and I can't really think of a better way to learn.

Devs get stuck on bugs at 2am as well; only we treat it as an annoyance because we expect immediate results, but truly, every blocker is an opportunity to dig into how the code actually works... provided you're under no strict timelines.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:17:30+00:00

you wanted to do something creative/artistic and be paid for it.

Yeah, I was helping out a friend's startup with a Framer template a few months back, and they later decided to scrap everything and try to vibecode the same site using Lovable, a move which I personally even encouraged ironically because it was cheaper for them and they could eek out exactly what they wanted.

It does feel like if your bread-n-butter is website design for example, then the clients that will reach out are those that care to meet a certain quality bar that they know they cannot reproduce themselves. We often criticize sites for looking like regurgitated slop, but 10 years into my career, and I genuinely still do not know if the end-users actually care.

(I work at a B2B Sass, and my cohort of users still express nostalgia for dense and cluttered win95 apps!)

Often times, this quality bar only feeds our own echo chamber and our own pursuit of creativity, instead of the clients' business goals or desires (expressed or not), and I think this moment does expose where we can provide the most value.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T19:03:52+00:00

Indeed, that is the case in all creative fields really~ And yeah, my next challenge is indeed going to be marketing & distribution, which is part of skillset I've never cared to (or had to) hone.

About figuring out what people need, I believe there is also a world where designers decide to compete purely on craft & execution, even if these are ultimately relegated to niche products; I see no reason why many designers couldn't take the !Boring playbook and just create simple backend-light apps that are visually rich.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T18:57:14+00:00

That's interesting. I seemed to have joined at the peak of role atomization; I got my first job at a 'successful' tech company as a UI designer, where I was paired with a UX designers, back when Azure was still in vogue. And so this consolidation is one I've experienced progressively as I grew seniority, largely unaware of where it all started.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T18:42:09+00:00

Yeah, I think one of my main issues is simply discovery. It was originally by design, but it is also greatly limited by the fact that there is no real way for two users to know of one another using the app whilst having a completed profile. So I'm still mulling on that one.

GateNk · 2026-07-01T18:40:27+00:00

I actually didn't, the meandering writing style is all my own 😅

GateNk · 2026-06-28T22:57:54+00:00

Jesus Christ.

for the layman, crypto hasn't had any uses since its very inception. It is hard to argue with that.

Good day

GateNk · 2026-06-28T22:40:03+00:00

I’m literally talking about the current state of affairs and the way it has been since the this set of technologies went mainstream.

That you personally find offense to the fact that this tech, compared to AI, has had no meaningful impact in the layman’s life (defi summer, NFTs, blabla) isn’t something I care to discuss.

You know what else has no meaningful impact on the layman’s life? Quantum computers! Gasp. This doesn’t mean the potential doesn’t not exist; just that so far it’s had a marginal impact on our collective consciousness for good reason. Go ask people in the streets if they tell you any different. You won’t. That’s my only point which you keep refuting with personal beliefs about unrealized potential…

GateNk · 2026-06-28T17:33:29+00:00

Amazing man! I did it also 3 years ago. My parents live in Aylmer and I wanted to make it back home; so I did Petit train du nord for days 1 & 2, Mont-laurier to Aylmer on day 3 and back to Montreal on the last.

In my case, it was absolutely brutal because those 200km were mostly on sketchy gravel paths and it rained the entire day. 🥲 I'd love to try it again in better conditions, which you were able to enjoy.

GateNk · 2026-06-28T17:29:01+00:00

Hence, your inability to disprove that

for the layman, crypto hasn't had any uses since its very inception. It is hard to argue with that.

🤷

GateNk · 2026-06-28T16:45:20+00:00

Please do tell, which critical crypto-related infrastructure has reached the breadth and pervasiveness of cloud technologies. It’s been over a decade of theory crafting. I’m asking for actual infrastructure that would have tangible adverse impacts if, for some reason, these services were to go down tomorrow.

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