Gokul Rajaram broke design Twitter yesterday. The man knows how to get attention. He said there won’t be any design roles anymore. People will rely on outsourced designers to come in, set up a design system. No permanent design roles in companies.

Engineers and PMs will design going forward.

If you have worked with good designers, you know this is not happening.

This whole AI psychosis pandemic has turned every role into a funeral. People vibe code a landing page using the latest Claude model and declare that Figma is dead. 

Designers are dead. Front end engineers dead. PMs dead. Everyone is dead except the guy posting the thread. That guy is safe. Because they are doing something that AI can’t do. Of course.

They believe front-end engineering is just generating static components. They think designer’s job is creating a design system. Then whenever there is a requirement, they just open Figma, pick a button from their system, choose a card component, send it to the developer, and call it a day.

IMHO there are at least four layers to designing a product.

First, there is product design. What problem are we even solving? Who has the problem? Why does it matter? What is the smallest thing we can ship that actually changes user behavior?

Then there is interaction design. What is the flow? What happens when the user taps this? How do we give feedback on the user’s action? What are the edge case? What happens when the user has bad internet? 

There is visual design. The actual screen. The hierarchy. The spacing. The type. The contrast. Yes, you can use a design system for this. But even then it is a judgement call on which components to pick.

And then there is aesthetics. Delight. Wow. Whatever you want to call it. It is Emil (great animation course by the way) adding some animation that makes the screen come alive. It is Benji going deep into delighting the user with every interaction in the Family app.

I read an article somewhere, I think it was by the Boring Apps guy, that said the best apps are games. In other words, there is a layer of design that turns an app into a game. You can call it the fifth layer.

You start from the highest abstraction and keep going lower.

Yes, you can start with code. You can start with Figma. You can start with a paper sketch. It does not matter. The tool is not the point.


20 years back the tool was Photoshop. Then it was Sketch. Then Figma. It can be Claude Code tomorrow.

The job of a designer is turning an abstract problem into a real solution that reaches the end user’s device.

A design system helps you ship the artefact faster. It does not tell you what to build.

And Figma will obviously get agents soon. It is inevitable. A lot of the boring operational work will get automated. You will describe a screen, and Figma will generate the first draft. You will ask for states, and it will create them. You will ask it to clean up spacing, align components, maybe even create a prototype.

But this does not mean that designers disappear. The best designers will just get more leverage.

The same thing is already happening with developers. Good engineers are now not paid because they can write functions. They are paid because they can think through tradeoffs. Architecture. Scale. Reliability. What to build now. What not to build. Where to be careful. Where to move fast.

The actual code writing is slowly becoming less important.

While judgment (dare I call it taste) is becoming more important.

Design will go the same way.

I have been writing about this for a few years now. Tech is going down the high-finance path. Smaller teams. Higher leverage. Fewer people doing more work. The middle gets squeezed. The best people get paid absurdly well because one good person with the right tools can now do the work of five decent people. 

I know this well because when I left my job last year, I bought a lot of design books. I even posted a photo of all my books stacked together. It went viral.

I read most of them. I spent time in Figma. I bought 3 courses. Emil’s. Rauno’s. Josh Puckett’s.



I have created tons of landing pages. Components. Posters. Random brand explorations. I got better. But incrementally.

There is a big difference between someone who can make something neat and someone who can make something great. I can make things neat. I can’t create great.

Maybe someday.

The best designers don’t just make neat things from standardised design systems. They make things feel great. They know when to add tension. When to remove. When to make something quiet. When to make it loud. When to break the grid. When to respect it.

There is a famous design head in India who apparently says during design reviews, “Ismein sex nahi hai. Mazza nahi aa raha.”

Crude, but accurate. He is talking about the missing element. The thing that separates neat work from great.

Most AI-generated design today has no sex. Because today’s models mostly generate the highest-probability output. They give you what the internet has already agreed a thing should look like. That is useful when you want speed. When you want a design system. It is not enough when you want wow.

The wow often comes from breaking away from the obvious output. 

And yes, models will get better. Much better. They will generate more options, understand taste better, but everyone will have access to the same models. And everyone will get the same results.

There was a time when every SaaS company had the same friendly vector illustrations. Then everyone used the same pastel blobs. Then everyone discovered the same serif fonts. Then everyone used the same Bento grids. Then everyone started using Instrument Serif. All of these felt fresh initially. When everyone adopted them, it became slop.

AI will accelerate this cycle. A style will become popular. Everyone will prompt it. Then users will stop feeling anything.

That is why taste matters. And not design systems. And why there will still be designers. And they will be paid very well.