Designers With These Skills Are Poised to Thrive in the Age of AI
Meet your new engineering partner
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s brutal out there for many in tech and UX. Thousands of talented product managers, developers, content creators, researchers, and designers have been laid off and are actively job hunting. Remote roles are increasingly scarce, and competition is fierce. Management roles are diminishing, teams are downsizing, and companies are shifting their hiring strategies to regions with lower labor costs or adopting AI to automate roles.
Meanwhile, AI capabilities are advancing rapidly. While some doubt AI's ability to replace human roles, the data suggests otherwise. Experts predict that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities—will potentially arrive in just 2 to 3 years.
What does this rapid technological shift mean for UX designers? Two things:
Buckle up—change is accelerating, and professional & aspiring designers must be able to quickly adapt to new tools and processes.
Designers who proactively develop certain key skills may not only remain relevant but thrive in an AI-driven era.
AI’s Impact on Tech and Design Roles
AI systems like DeepMind’s AlphaCode already match or beat average human programmers in coding challenges, and tools like GitHub Copilot are automating coding tasks with remarkable efficiency. These advancements directly impact tech employment:
Software engineering job postings in the U.S. have dropped by more than a third in the past five years.
Increasingly, developer roles are shifting from writing code to reviewing and managing AI-generated code.
According to KeyBank’s CIO, Amy Brady, AI may replace many entry-level coding jobs but simultaneously elevate other roles to focus on higher-level strategic tasks.
UX roles have also faced turbulence. Around 35% of organizations reduced design staff in 2024, echoing downturn levels last seen during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Yet, there is optimism: 70% of hiring managers plan to hire UX professionals in 2025, expecting an eventual recovery.
Why Designers Are Uniquely Positioned
Strategic-minded designers possess skills that AI cannot easily replicate:
Empathy and deep user insight: Designers excel at understanding human needs and emotional contexts.
Vision and holistic thinking: Designers naturally approach products as complete experiences, essential in guiding AI effectively.
Iterative mindset: Designers already embrace rapid experimentation and feedback, crucial for AI-driven development cycles.
Just like a product team laser focused on creating technical solutions (most of us have worked on a few of those teams), AI coding solutions are designed to generate and deliver code. Strategic designers are poised to provide the empathy and user insights that will lead to the creation of products that actually make a difference in people’s lives. In this new way of working a hybrid designer/product manager can collaborate with an AI engineering partner to create an entire product.
My Experience with Vibe Coding
Recently, I explored firsthand the potential of "vibe coding"—leveraging AI to rapidly prototype & build products without traditional programming skills. By collaborating with advanced AI tools, I quickly iterated on ideas, refined user experiences, and accelerated development timelines dramatically. This experience underscored how effectively designers can guide AI tools to realize complex product visions.
Within less than two days, working with Claude 3.7 as my tech partner, I had a fairly complex and fully functional web application running locally on my Macbook. Not only did Claude provide functional code (my tech stack includes Python, Node.js, Tailwind.css, and leverages APIs from OpenAI and Pinecone), the user interface it delivered is very well laid out and perfectly usable for an MVP.
Building an MVP with Claude was more than a successful experiment, it was a revelation. The potential exists right now for AI to empower designers by acting as their tech partner (and the technology is only getting more capable with each release). This should serve as a wake up call for designers to embrace AI’s development capabilities and for companies to rethink the staffing models of modern software product teams.
Practical Steps for Designers to Thrive in The AI Era
To succeed with AI, designers should:
Start small: Begin experimenting with manageable, low-risk projects.
Develop prompt-engineering skills: Craft precise, effective prompts to guide AI outputs. Encourage the AI to ask you clarifying questions to reduce ambiguity and ensure you’re on the same page.
Explore key tools: Familiarize yourself with GPT-4, Claude, GitHub Copilot, and AI integrations in design tools like Figma.
You’ll be most effective if you’re able to:
Clearly articulate your product vision and experience strategy.
Think strategically & holistically about functionality and the value delivered to users.
Communicate precisely about desired outcomes and user experiences.
Begin by writing up clear user journeys that define the experience and interactions you’re intending to create (pro tip: you can use LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to help you write these as well). Make sure to provide insights about the user needs that you’re addressing.
It also helps to write, prioritize, and share user stories (I use a simple problem statement syntax to ensure my partners understand user context/triggers, actions, outcomes, and obstacles) to get alignment on the product roadmap.
From there, your AI partner should have more than enough context to start generating code. If you have any questions along the way about directory structures, how to use Terminal/command line prompts, setting up a git repository, or debugging code, just ask. I’ve found Claude and ChatGPT to be very helpful & patient teachers when needed.
Future-Proofing Your Design Career
Critical skills for designers collaborating with AI include:
AI literacy and prompt engineering.
Systems thinking and strategic product design.
Effective cross-functional collaboration and communication.
Comfort navigating ambiguity and guiding AI-generated outputs.
The Opportunity Ahead
The best way to get started is simply to try it. I realize that the idea of coding can be daunting, but there’s no reason to be intimidated. You’re likely to encounter some challenges, learning curves, and make mistakes along the way, but that’s all a natural part of your learning journey. I encourage any designer to begin experimenting with this way of working as soon as possible because I foresee massive potential for designers with this skill set to succeed in this new paradigm.
