How AI changed me as a designer, and into more than one

A few years ago, I thought my job ended at the handoff. I designed the screens, wrote the spec, and passed it to engineers who would decide what was actually possible. I was good at the thinking. I just couldn’t make the thing.

That gap used to define me. It doesn’t anymore.

The first crack was Framer, and a little of my own code. For the first time I was designing in the real medium instead of drawing pictures of it. A hover state wasn’t a note in a file, it was something I could feel. I started to understand that design and material are not separate steps. The material has opinions, and you can only hear them if you are holding it.

Then came Figma and Cursor. I would design a flow, then open the codebase and, with AI sitting next to me, actually change it. I stopped being afraid of the repository. The error messages stopped feeling like a locked door. I wasn’t an engineer, but I no longer needed permission to try.

VS Code and Claude Code collapsed the distance even further. A whole flow, from empty file to working prototype, in an afternoon. The loop between what if and here, look got so short that I started thinking differently. I stopped pre-deciding what was feasible. I just built the small version and saw.

Now my main tool is a terminal and Claude Code. This is the part that still surprises me. I don’t only build interfaces with it, I automate the work around the work. An agent writes my morning brief before I wake up. Another sorts and sources my photos. The boring parts of my week quietly handle themselves, and I get the hours back for the parts that need a person.

Here is what I want to be honest about: I am not shipping production systems. I prototype, I build small tools, I automate daily duties. The things I make with AI are experiments, and I call them that on purpose. The point was never to become an engineer. The point was that the wall between designing something and making something, the wall I used to live behind, is gone.

What changed wasn’t only my toolbar. It was my sense of what a designer is allowed to be.

I still think in systems. I still care most about people, about the messy human and organizational problems that don’t have clean screens. That hasn’t moved. But now, when I see a problem, I don’t stop at a recommendation. I can build a version of the answer and put it in someone’s hands the same week. The thinking and the making finally belong to the same person.

People sometimes ask if AI makes design feel less like craft. For me it’s the opposite. The craft moved up a level. I spend less time pushing pixels into place and more time deciding what is worth making at all, then steering the tools toward it. Taste, judgment, knowing when a thing is good, those matter more now, not less.

I used to introduce myself as a product designer and quietly hope no one asked whether I could code. Now I say I’m a product designer who builds with AI, and I mean every word of it. Same curiosity, same love of structure and sensemaking. Just a much shorter distance between the idea and the thing.

AI didn’t replace the designer in me. It gave her more than one job, and she likes it.