The Territory You Haven’t Claimed
The tools are ready. The demand is real. So what's stopping us?
Last week I wrote that the craft is still here, it’s just a different shape now. This week I found pieces that answered the obvious follow-up: what shape?
Figma’s latest hiring study shows 82% of organizations need more designers, driven partly by AI creating new product surface area. Their State of the Designer 2026 finds designers occupying a “messy middle” between product management and engineering, with 91% saying clear goals help them do their best work and 87% saying decision-making power boosts performance. Demand is up. The tools have compressed execution. Designers should be thriving.
So why does it feel like the profession is having an identity crisis on a weekly news cycle?
The territory has been redrawn, and it’s more strategic than what we had before. Start with time. Jenny Wen, head of design at Claude, says her team is spending 30-40% of their time on mockups now, down from 60-70%. The rest goes to pairing with engineers and implementation. That tracks with the economics: when the cost of producing software collapses, the artifact stops being the job. The judgment is the job. And judgment now has better tools to express itself. Spec-driven development lets designers write intent into structured documents that AI agents build against directly. The spec isn’t a suggestion. It’s enforceable. The same logic applies to design systems: instead of compressing your reasoning into tokens and components, you can ship the reasoning itself when you design in plain English. And when interfaces start acting autonomously, designers are the ones who should be setting the confidence thresholds: how sure does the system need to be before it acts without asking?
That’s a lot of new ground. Judgment, reasoning, thresholds, specs. More strategic than a Figma file ever was.
And yet. Nicole Michaelis called it out: the profession is trying on identities like clothes in a dressing room. “Monday, it’s all about prototypes. Thursday, it’s vibe coding. Friday, we’re preaching that output no longer matters” and we should all be strategists. By next Monday, we’re debating soft skills. The retreat to craft and taste as differentiators is understandable, but craft is the baseline, not the selling point. Debating what makes us special instead of demonstrating it is the creative class version of what’s happening at the company level too: wearing what Claire Vo called “the bows and ribbons” of transformation while the organizational bones stay calcified. The tools are good enough. The gap is behavioral.
The territory is there. The data around the demand confirms it. On my own team, the shift is starting to happen: designers are spending more time with customers, more time in research and discovery, and pushing further into product strategy. Less time in Figma, more time defining what we’re building and why. That’s what claiming the new ground actually looks like. Not a theoretical expansion of the role, but a practical one: you show up earlier in the process, you own more of the decision, and the mockup becomes one artifact among many instead of the whole deliverable. The designers who are making this shift won’t need to argue for their seat at the table. They’ll already be sitting in it.
Spec-Driven Development: It Looks Like Waterfall (And I Feel Fine)
We’ve been talking a lot about agentic engineering, how software is now getting built with AI. As I look to see how design can complement this new development paradigm, a newish methodology called spec-driven development caught my eye. The idea is straightforward: you write a detailed specification first, then AI agents generate the code from it. The specification becomes the source of truth, not the code.
My first reaction when I started reading about SDD was: wait, isn’t this just waterfall?
Seriously. You gather requirements. You write them down in a structured document. You hand that document to someone (or something) that builds to spec. That’s the waterfall pattern. We spent two decades running away from it, and now it’s back wearing a blue Patagonia vest and calling itself a methodology.
But there is a difference.
What I’m Consuming
A24’s Empire of Auteurs. Alex Barasch profiles A24’s evolution from scrappy indie distributor to a $3.5-billion studio that develops films with directors rather than attaching them to finished scripts. Noah Sacco, the head of film, is the connective tissue: beloved by filmmakers for trusting their instincts while knowing when to push. The tension between scaling up (Dwayne Johnson, Elden Ring adaptation) and the indie roots that made the brand (Kelly Reichardt calls the shift “a heartbreak”) is the piece’s real subject. (Alex Barasch / The New Yorker)
In But Not Of. Christopher Butler writes about the science fiction novels that have stayed with him across decades and realizes they share a common thread: characters who witness transformation without the power to change it. He maps this onto his own position as a technologist who uses the tools daily but can see where the narratives about technology diverge from reality. A personal essay about the discipline of paying attention when everyone around you is optimizing for speed. (Christopher Butler)
On Software Quality. Nick Heer catalogs the bugs he hits daily across Apple’s ecosystem: Finder glitches, AirDrop failures, Safari oddities, Siri asking him to tap the screen to pause music while his hands are covered in food. Jason Snell’s annual survey pegs Apple’s software quality at a B-minus, and Heer argues even that’s generous. The kicker: Apple ships hardware that feels bulletproof, which makes the software gap that much more glaring. (Nick Heer / Pixel Envy)
The AI Bubble Is Bursting. Hugh Howey separates three questions people conflate: Will AI disappear? (No.) Is the hype overblown? (Yes, 80% of firms polled show no productivity gains.) Will the investment pay off? (Unclear, and seven trillion dollars in projected data center spending is a lot of GPUs to strand.) His sharpest point: the browser wars taught us that customers won’t pay extra when free is good enough, and Google has every incentive to give AI away. (Hugh Howey)
Vibe Coding and the Maker Movement. Sachin draws a structural parallel between vibe coding and the Maker Movement of 2005-2015, then identifies the key difference: vibe coding skipped the “scenius” phase where hobbyists develop judgment through play. The tools went straight to production before anyone had time to learn what’s worth building. His reframe—vibe coding as “consumption of surplus intelligence”—is the most interesting lens I’ve seen on why building with AI can feel simultaneously productive and hollow. (Sachin / Technically)