Is AI going to steal my job as a design engineer?

There's a gap between what AI can do and what I do for a living. Every few months it gets a little smaller.

Maybe that stops. Maybe models plateau and the gap holds. But there's no sign of it yet.

What is a design engineer?

Nobody knows.

I'm half joking — some see it as a designer that can code and ship, others see it as an engineer with design taste that can build thoughtful, well-crafted UIs. The lines are blurred, but I fit more with the latter. My background is in engineering, but over time I've taken on more and more design responsibilities.

The gaps are shrinking

Our jobs are changing.

For me, a lot of this has been great! All of the tedious stuff like scaffolding up modal UIs or copying content into code can be handed off to agents. They do it way faster than I could, and I can focus on the work I'm more passionate about.

Human engineers can't compete with AI on speed or efficiency, so to keep up we need to focus on the things AI can't do well.

Right now, that's things like:

• Knowing what not to build: Agents are often a little too eager to build whatever is requested by any means necessary.
• Generating novel ideas: Chatting with AI can make it easier to pull fresh ideas out of a human, but the agents don't tend to come up with much on their own.
• Crafting visual experiences: Complex visuals and rendering like beautiful gradients and animated backgrounds still need human eyes and taste™.

What still matters

Humans are always going to value things that are hand-made and carefully crafted, but they'll also value money. AI's making it easier and easier to generate "good-enough" software, and it'll get harder for businesses to justify paying extra salaries just for some "non-essential" craft and polish.

On the other hand, code's becoming a commodity. If everybody has the power to "one-shot" a product, some things are going to set a product worth using apart from all of the slop: craft and polish.

My job doesn't look quite like it did a few years ago, and I think we'll see that trend continue. The tools will keep getting better, and I'll keep finding the gaps that need a human touch to make something special.