The Paradox of the AI Designer

Inside the Paradox

UX design hiring has been essentially flat since 2023, while Product Management (PM) and Engineering demand has grown. Lenny Rachitsky’s 2025 survey of over 8,000 technology workers found that UX designers and researchers have the highest burnout of any role (24%), in comparison to 15% for PMs and 13% for engineers. Nielsen Norman Group called it a “UX Reckoning.” UX job postings have dropped to roughly 70% of their 2021 peak, and entry-level, Big Tech design hires are down 50% from 2019.

Image source: Lenny’s Newsletter

Here’s what is also true from the same moment: a 2026 survey of 900 designers by Designer Fund and Foundation Capital found the following:

• 50% of designers had shipped AI-generated code to production.
• 65% of designers said they are taking on more Product and Engineering responsibilities.
• 91% of designers are using AI tools weekly—up from 54% the year before.
• The fastest growing companies are doing design without product managers. It is truly amazing what a single design engineer can build in a weekend.

So which is it? The best of times or the worst of times? The reality is: both are happening simultaneously to different UX designers—for a reason that has almost nothing to do with their tools.

Design Skills Are No Longer a Moat

It has become very popular to oversimplify the impact of current AI tooling. “AI can only get to 80%.” “The quality still isn’t there.” These simple narratives don’t really explain what’s actually happening.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have AI psychosis. But no one can deny the horrifying quantity of AI slop that is being produced. I heard recently about an Engineering team at a major technology company that, because of the pain of reviewing AI-produced code, had stopped accepting pull requests (PRs)—which notify other team members that they’ve completed a set of code changes and want to merge them into the main codebase. Everywhere, PMs are handing vibe-slopped prototypes to UX designers to pretty up. AI influencers on LinkedIn are talking about how AI-pilled they are. It’s hard not to constantly roll your eyes.

However, some companies are genuinely doing things differently. At Laurel, I’ve seen a PM with no design background produce design work that I would have been happy to see from a mid-level, individual-contributor UX designer—with decent layouts, workflows, and copy—with help from Claude Design. I’ve seen a sales leader prototype internal tools that dramatically increased the team’s velocity. I’ve also seen a UX designer create a working prototype using real data, test it with the actual customer who requested the feature, and ship the change within two days.

What AI is doing is democratizing the execution layer. Anyone with a clear idea and an afternoon can produce wireframes, component logic, user flows, and first-draft copy—the stuff that used to be proof that designers were doing their job.

The people who feel most threatened right now are the ones whose value lived in the work that AI has just gotten reasonably good at. The people who feel least threatened are those whose value has always been in something that execution was supposed to be in service of.

The Repercussions of Get-Out-of-My-Figma Energy

Recently, Claire Vo, Chief Product Officer at LaunchDarkly, posted a response to Lenny Rachitsky’s data about the decline of UX design hiring relative to Product Management and Engineering.

Image source: @clairevo on X

The people she’s describing aren’t fictional. I’ve managed them. I’ve been frustrated by them. Designers who wouldn’t share their Figma files after a product review. Designers who’d dismiss feedback because the person giving it didn’t have a design background. Designers who’d treat the A/B testing of their work as a personal affront rather than a way to find out whether a solution actually worked.

I want to call out the most important part from Claire’s post: “If a PM or engineer can get 85% there with tailwind and a dream, you better come to the table with more than ‘I represent the user’.”

For a long time, “I represent the user” was less a description of what UX designers did and more a force field—a claim that kept the messiness of business metrics, engineering constraints, and executive anxiety at arm’s length. It sort of worked, until they didn’t need us anymore and we lost our leverage. The uncomfortable truth is that, for many of the stakeholders who funded our teams, designers’ value was never obvious enough to begin with.

So why bother, right? Let’s all fall on our sword and let the power looms take over. Except Claire ended her post with this note: “Great designers are worth more than almost anyone on the team.”

If you’ve been lucky enough to work on or with a great UX Design team, you’ll agree. And what’s more, the design mindset is more important now than ever before.

Why the World Needs UX Designers in the Age of AI

I wrote recently about enshittification—the way platforms almost inevitably drift from creating value for users to extracting it from them. UX designers are the panacea to enshittification. Engineers love building things. PMs get measured on metrics. The business wants growth. In most organizational structures, the person arguing that the product should do right by users is going against the grain of what incentivizes almost every other person in the room. That’s the UX designer’s job. That’s always been the job.

A UX designer is someone who believes that creating value for users is more important than anything else—and is willing and able to fight for that belief in a room full of people who are being measured on something different.

Notice what isn’t in that definition. Nothing about Figma. Nothing about wireframes, prototyping tools, research methods, or deliverables. Those are all practices—they’re the tools and processes through which we’ve expressed our convictions. They’re the looms.

The convictions are the thing—and they’re getting more important, not less, exactly because AI is making it so easy to move fast in any direction. Speed amplifies. If your team has taste and judgment, AI lets you ship better things faster. If your team is optimizing for the wrong things, AI lets you optimize for the wrong things at twice the speed. Having the person in the room who asks should we actually be building this? has never been more necessary.

What the Weavers Did

The weavers who survived industrialization did so in three ways:

1. They operated the machines. Most weavers learned to operate and maintain the new looms. Their knowledge of what made good cloth didn’t become irrelevant; it helped them reskill. They stopped being the hands and started being the human judgment.
2. They built the machines. Many curious weavers took their knowledge of the craft—thread count, pattern, and so on—and managed the looms. But the most industrious of them created newer and better looms. They taught the operators new and different ways to make cloth and innovated the use of the technology.
3. They became artisans. Some weavers didn’t operate the machines at all. They doubled down on doing what the machines couldn’t do, and built a market around that difference. Hand-woven goods became luxury goods—genuinely rare and genuinely worth more. These weavers set trends, established norms, and pushed the craft forward.

What This Means for UX Designers

UX designers can choose to embark upon three different paths, as follows:

1. Many UX designers are joining their PMs and engineers as end-to-end operators. UX designers will step up and take full ownership of what gets built. At Laurel, UX designers are leading projects end to end—writing briefs, building prototypes, writing pull requests, and pushing work across the finish line. Here’s the interesting implication of this shift: the functional distinction between a UX designer, a PM, and an engineer is now collapsing. At AI-native companies such as Laurel, the question isn’t who’s the designer and who’s the PM? It’s who is best positioned to take on particular parts of the problem?
2. Some UX designers are specializing and, thus, building the systems for others to implement. Those designers who are truly excellent at their craft will always be a step ahead of AI. We’re seeing this now with motion design, brand design, and research. But the job won’t simply be sitting in the corner perfecting a craft. It’s asking how can I scale my excellence to my team. At Laurel, this looks like designers’ building skills that PMs and engineers can use for design critiques or setting up a design system in Claude Design.
3. Some UX designers are becoming artisans. These designers design for the sake of design, without caring about the commercial implications. Some of their work will push our industry forward and a tiny percentage of them will be compensated very well. But just as for art, most of these people will be doing it for themselves.

Three Questions Worth Asking Yourself

Even if we wanted to, we can’t stop AI from changing UX design. What we can do is figure out where we sit in this new world and how we can ensure that what we build makes the world a better place. We need to ask ourselves the following questions:

• Do we have opinions about what should be built or just how to build it? The UX designer who says, this feature is a mistake and here’s why, is different from the designer who says, if we’re building this, here’s how we should build it. The first maps to the builder role—someone who has real influence over the product. The second maps to the specialist—someone who makes whatever does get built dramatically better.
• Are we willing to learn new things just to get stuff done? Not as an intellectual exercise but as a daily practice. UX designers who pick up enough coding to ship a fix, enough data analysis to make the business case, or enough prompting to run their own research sprint are different from the designers who believe their contribution should stay within a narrower scope of what they define as design.
• Do we define our career by our beliefs about craft, taste, and beauty—or by our beliefs about users? Stripping away the Figma access, the design reviews, and the deliverables, is there something underneath that’s still ours? A set of beliefs about what makes great design? Or do we believe that UX design is ultimately in service to our users?

Resolving the Paradox

The outcomes of resolving the paradox will differ depending on what paths UX designers choose to take:

• For the UX designer whose identity lives in the craft—This designer’s path ahead is specialization—excellence in craftsmanship, systems thinking, adaptability, and learning to build the tools that keep everyone else moving toward quality.
• For the UX designer whose identity lives in solving problems for people—This designer genuinely believes that creating value for users is worth fighting for and the path ahead is a level of influence and opportunity to which most UX designers have never had access.
• For the UX designer whose identity remains in the old role—This designer might have a rough path ahead. This designer wants to preserve clean lines between Design and everything else and doesn’t want to change,

Of course, the power loom did not end cloth, but it ended one kind of cloth maker and created space for another. We’re somewhere in the middle of a similar transition. The question worth asking, before AI answers it for you, is which type of designer you are.