Designers are cooked by AI. Really?

By now you've seen this play out. "SaaS is dead." "Anyone can code." Forty-seven versions of someone's to-do list app, shipped over a weekend, posted with pride. Layoffs rolling through Silicon Valley like a slow tide.

Now it's the designer's turn, apparently.

After Anthropic launched Claude Design and OpenAI dropped their latest image model, my feed turned into a gallery overnight. Polished visuals, slick animations, flashy websites. And right behind them, the takes: designers are done. Non-designers sharing their "vibe designs," announcing they no longer need to wait on turnarounds or spend money on the real thing. Anyone can prompt beauty now. So what exactly are we paying designers for?

Here's my take: both yes and no, and that's not a cop-out, I promise.

The "yes" part is uncomfortable but fair. Some designers are, in fact, done. Specifically, the ones who were already pushing pixels like they're an AI model themselves, going through the motions, collecting a paycheck, no real skin in the game. For them, the window is closing. A non-designer can now generate something "good enough" in ten seconds, and that non-designer doesn't show up to meetings with baggage. Cruel? Sure. But here we are.

The "you don't need a designer anymore" crowd makes sense, if they're working from a definition of design that was never quite right to begin with. Design as decoration. Design as "making things pretty." If anything, making things beautiful is almost the last thing we do.

The elite designers and agencies I know? Pipelines full. Watching this whole circus with something close to amusement, because the panic is doing their filtering for them. The clients who thought design was just "making things pretty" are rage-quitting to collect prompts and feed them to ChatGPT. Good riddance, honestly.

What makes these designers irreplaceable isn't some mystical gift. It's accumulated judgment, years of knowing which questions to ask before anything gets made, understanding what a brand actually needs versus what a client thinks they want, and feeling, in a way that's genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn't been in the room, when something's right versus when something that looks right is quietly wrong.

You can't prompt that. Not yet, anyway.

None of this means I'm dismissing the tools. I'm a power user myself. They've genuinely freed up space in my process, more room for the wild explorations that actually matter. The point isn't "AI can't touch us." The point is that the tool is only as interesting as the person directing it. Photoshop didn't kill photographers. It gave them a darkroom with no limits, and the ones with a vision went places nobody expected.

And here's the part nobody's really talking about: junior roles are evaporating. Which sounds fine until you remember that junior roles are where senior designers come from. That's where the judgment gets built, the slow, unglamorous, occasionally humiliating process of making things, getting them wrong, and figuring out why. If that pipeline dries up, the talent gap won't show immediately. But it will show. Give it a decade.

Will AI have a trained eye by then? I don't know. What I do know is that right now, AI has access to everything that's already been made, and no idea why any of it matters to the specific person sitting across the table from you.

That gap is still yours to own. Don't sleepwalk through it.