Design isn't going to disappear into code

There is this feeling that design and engineering are destined to get collapsed into one process. You specify what you need and agents will build it. You can then iterate on the actual product.

I've had this thought myself at one point or another. But the more I've played with AI (also known as "super intelligence") design and coding agents, the more I've come to the contrary view.

I think design will become more important and more distinct from the act of building software.

Building an interface and designing an experience are two different problems.

Designing is about hypothesizing, understanding users, making trade-offs and having a consistent viewpoint on how things should be. The interface is only one artifact of the design process.

"Super intelligence" is making it immensely more feasible to go from idea to coded product. But that doesn't mean that we have solved what the correct implementation is.

If anything I think it creates a new problem. When the cost of existence is near zero, we will have more possibilities than ever before without better methods of evaluation.

Which is why I think there will still be a need for a design process within teams. A place to ideate, question, integrate research and reach consensus on the experience you're building.

Now this isn't to say that we go back to some waterfall method of development where designers create static screens and hand them off to engineers. Design will become more iterative and so will implementation. Both will involve agents.

But I don't think they become the same thing.

In fact I think you will see an entirely new class of AI-first design tools that will exist around this difference in process. Tools that don't just create interfaces. Tools that help teams think through problems, coordinate specialized agents, evaluate options and carry the intent of a decision.

The tools we use to design and develop software will converge.

But what we create and what we decide to create are still two different things.

And as making things gets easier, figuring out what to make will become a lot more valuable. More importantly, whether it's humans or agents doing the work, I think design will need to remain its own distinct, intentional part of the process.