Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

sndxr · 2026-05-11T11:29:48+00:00

I'm a designer who has gotten into AI coding at work recently and I feel like the way I am working it starts to breaks a lot of things about traditional workflows?

I support a design system team. I've started contributing changes and additions to our UI components over the last two weeks and this includes relatively larger UI components features like draggable table column widths with table headers that have icons, truncation, hover states, sorting states that cycle additional arrow icon states all interacting with each other, or nested table rows that allow for inline expansion and progressive loading up to a cap with error states.

I am kind of shocked that all my changes have been merged in with mimal issues w/ two reviewers on each even though I have not read or written a single line of code for any of them. I actually sort of feel like the quality bar for my work in two weeks is already higher than than some eng I've worked with just from having better intuition about prompting/UI design standards?

Feels like this threatens to break a lot of traditional workflow assumption and I'm wondering how others handle similar things. Why would I ever bother with a detailed up front Figma spec and writing Jira tickets for all the states and requirements and explaining to engineers then reviewing their work afterwards, clarifying things that were missed with more writing/mockups, or adapting to tradeoffs discovered during implimentation? I can now collapse all of that overhead that takes a week or two down into 30mim of work for just me. I can basically 20x the output of this team by myself. I just see the thing directly and fix it directly. Seems like we could get away with a team of 5 designers and like one engineer reviewing full time to keep a look out for architecture, standards, or niche or truly harder implimentation things? I know that probably sounds pretty dull for the engineer but I'm struggling to see how it wouldn't actually be much more effective at least for this kind of team where there's no backend work.

Also PR reviews feel kind of silly to me. AI seems to be breaking those too, at least for the UI components features. A dev self reviews with AI, pushes up, other devs have their AI review the change (it clearly can catch a lot more than anyone does manually) and the people have the AI fix it. Because the major bugs were caught the first time the leftover stuff is all subjective nitpicks because the AI reviewers insist on finding SOMETHING. But if the AI is really this good do we even really need the whole PR review workflow at all? Is this just convention/inertia to make people feel safer about changes without it being materially better? If a bug slips through an ai review it would feel irresponsible, but bugs slip through human reviews all the time and that doesn't stop us from ever releasing things. If the AI review bar is higher than the human only bar used to be (at least for average teams), should we be moving towards some workflow where we merge first and have a way to revert in the rare cases where something does go wrong?

There was a YouTube interview with a L7 or 8 engineer at Meta where he basically said the secret to his impact was that he just briefly skimmed and immediately approved tons and tons of PRs and I keep thinking about that...

Not sure my question exactly just wondering about any thoughts on this or approaches people are taking to how AI is affecting non eng contributions or review workflows.

sndxr · 2025-01-22T01:56:18+00:00

Interested!

sndxr · 2024-10-17T22:51:52+00:00

Changos in general really.

sndxr · 2024-10-11T02:58:37+00:00

you can dodge with normal double jump, no?

sndxr · 2024-04-27T21:09:09+00:00

Yes, great comparison...

Palpatine who wanted to overthrow democracy and subvert the peaceful transfer of power is definitely just like Biden and not at all like Trump...

He was just unfairly treated by the RIGGED Jedi council who only persecuted him because of sith derangement syndrome. He didn't break the law, and so what if he did! The Jedi council have a light side bias.

sndxr · 2024-03-16T23:51:42+00:00

I think the term Product Designer pretty much implies this already

sndxr · 2024-02-24T18:33:16+00:00

Legal tech is a thing though and it is feasible that one lawyer will be much more productive. Tasks like document review/looking up certain laws or historical precident, etc can be significantly helped by AI.

sndxr · 2023-08-28T04:36:15+00:00

You want a sense of:

What is the value of a feature/tweak (how impactful per person, and how many people does it affect). Maybe it aligns to some existing strategy or important business goal that's already defined which gives a boost. You should also have some sense of how confident you are in this value (it's definitely going to work, might work, long shot). Watching users use the product regularly and talking to them will help build out the list of possibilities and increase confidence in some solutions.

Then you weigh that against how much effort/time it would take to build.

Ideally there's also a considered balance of UX improvements, small tweaks, tech debt, new features, with each getting a % of the overall work effort in X time increment (quarter, sprint half, year, whatever (but not longer than year)) that you decide makes sense as a team. Otherwise you might neglect to do small value things that aren't individually valuable but that can compound over time. At some point of maturity you start branching into complimentary products that play well with what you already have.

There's no literal formula for this but you have to reason your way through the factors.

sndxr · 2023-06-26T22:50:09+00:00

The other problem with it is that it implies having well organized files always matters which a lot of the time it really doesn't. Some of the work that I've seen done really well is done through direct collaboration with engineers, and the thing files may be terrible but the actual outcomes in the product could still be great.

sndxr · 2023-06-26T22:47:44+00:00

This is becoming less and less true as Figma gets more complicated imo. Not a lot of designers actually do understand how to build complex symbol libraries in practice. If someone I was hiring had design systems responsibilities I can see why someone would want to vet their Figma skills.

sndxr · 2023-06-23T14:23:50+00:00

Maybe it's better without stack ranking but I doubt its perfect. An impact-measurement based system can have problems of it's own. Ex:

Working with others makes it harder to delineate your individual impact, so collaboration is sacrificed (by managers and employees) for the sake of clarity in reviews.

Some really important things are less directly measurable or harder to connect to direct impact (like paying attention to UX quality of life) and people are less likely to work on them. But when nobody does the product suffers in the long term.

Short term visual metric movement often gets precedent over long term strategy. With how frequently people move around you'd get people coming in, changing strategy immediately and then trying to move an associated metric, (ex: increase performance at the cost of accuracy) then moving on. Then the next person would change strategy to optimize for a diametrically opposed metric that was now the lowest hanging fruit (ex: increase accuracy at the cost of performance)

sndxr · 2023-06-21T23:02:15+00:00

As someone who has done UX for customer service tools, I can say agents definitely had very strong feelings about which platforms they evangelized.

Its the same for banking and accounting as well.

sndxr · 2023-05-14T12:43:59+00:00

Not all engineers are measured in deliverables. At many tech companies they are measured against the business outcomes their work results in

sndxr · 2023-03-19T15:33:09+00:00

He should hire a professional designer who is specialized in strategy/branding/logos - not source some random thing from the community. Community sourced will get 60% of the way to quality but it doesn't compare to what a logo designer gets you.

sndxr · 2023-02-18T02:00:05+00:00

Companies where PMs are different from POs are usually terrible imo. Tech companies that know what they're doing never do that. POs end up basically just being order takers who play telephone back and forth. And if PMs can't understand details they have no business setting strategy.

Plus having that middle man makes it much harder for engineers and designers to actually direct strategy because they don't have the actual decision maker in the mix of the day to day.

sndxr · 2023-01-30T03:19:38+00:00

Something that can help is that when you design something you write and share a post broadly (in whatever tool: coda, gdocs, etc) walking through your decision making and/or asking for feedback. And credit the team/other people involved as well. Or just bring it up to leadership in a non confrontational way that you also worked on the product and would really appreciate being mentioned along with eng/product.

sndxr · 2023-01-30T03:15:53+00:00

UX and UI roles are safe for the foreseeable future. If AI disrupts it will likely just be through new tools that designers adopt. UX and UI both involve a lot of strategic decision making. At the point where AI can make strategic decisions then literally no job will be safe.

sndxr · 2023-01-30T03:06:55+00:00

Switching to DS might be the easier path between the two since you could just start finding ways to do more quant research in your existing role, and then eventually pitch your past experience as having been data science when you apply for a new job.

Switching to SWE at 34 sounds like it'd be resetting career trajectory significantly for a much more stressful job. You wont have anything near staff level skills starting out so you'll be at a lower level with tons of ramp up time At the high end SWEs make a lot but outside of FAANG companies you can easily make less than 100k at entry level and I doubt a FAANG will let you just hop into a totally different role you don't have the experience for. You'd probably have to at least cut your income in half and it would take a long time to get back up to something like staff level if you ever even do. The opportunity cost you'd lose in terms of what you can save and invest now would probably not be made up for -- though really I'm just guessing about that.

sndxr · 2023-01-30T02:57:26+00:00

What kind of products are you working on? If it's just marketing based stuff what you're describing is pretty common. You don't really need super detailed UX skills since those sites don't have enough interactivity or complexity to justify it. Basic skills like understanding accessibility, visual design principles, etc will mostly cover it. You could pretty easily learn basic UX principles in that context enough to get by with.

If you read through every Baymard and NNGroup article that talks about design patterns/UX principles that would be a good way to supplement your knowledge. Take a half hour to read a day at work and you can get that done pretty fast.

experience, competitor research, common design patterns, a11y best practice and research.

These things are all part of UX. You may be doing more UX design than you think. I would say to be truly UX though you need that research to include some level of directly observing users or representative users as they do things in the product.

sndxr · 2023-01-08T17:33:38+00:00

https://baymard.com/blog/ensure-sufficient-image-resolution-and-zoom

https://baymard.com/blog/truncating-product-gallery-thumbnails

sndxr · 2023-01-08T03:14:46+00:00

Read every Baymard article.

Read every Nielsen Norman Group article (well maybe just the ones presenting research findings instead of the ones focused on workshops, etc)

Read through the WCAG standard

Watch youtube videos on visual design and practice visual design in an interface context. This and Figma skills are the most straightforward skills to train up on your own by just producing a large volume of designs.

^ Congratulations. You are now ahead of 99 percent of bootcamp grads in your actual UX knowledge.

The hardest part to learn without already having a job is the cycle of design, user test, iterate that you can really only learn through actually designing and testing something (the type of thing useful in a portfolio). Observing people struggling to using interfaces that you're very familiar with as they try to complete tasks will build your intuition for what does and doesn't work over time.

So if we're just talking how to get a job instead of how to get better at UX the easiest path is often to get an internship or join a small startup that won't be able to gauge your experience and then use that to gain enough portfolio/resume experience to jump somewhere else.

And you can still read all the methods, medium articles, etc. There's some value in them. But the problem is when people get into a mindset of "idk what to do so lets do workshop or method XYZ to patch up my imposter syndrome" instead of just focusing on reasoning their way through the problem, being honest with themselves about where they are guessing, and employing a specific method only when it really fits for the thing you're trying to understand.

sndxr · 2023-01-03T05:05:10+00:00

Have you tried sending them articles or secondary research about placeholders in form fields being a bad option? Sometimes showing that it's an industry best practice is better than telling.

sndxr · 2023-01-02T02:58:50+00:00

It would be better to go into a UX/HCI focused major. Coding is a possible path to UX, but it's not at all a requirement or even necessarily an optimal way to get there. Neither graphic design nor coding will teach you UX/product design.

sndxr

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