Document: WM-104 P. Webb
Category: Industry 2026-09-27
Should developers design?
Abstract
Design, the practice deemed worthless two decades ago via the tired
meme “should designers code?” is now the only way to prove your
humanity (and worth?) in the age of slop.
Body
TL;DR: Yes, absolutely. Developers SHOULD pick up books, courses, and
immerse themselves in various disciplines of design; user experience,
color theory, typography, &c.
The existential crisis some developers are experiencing is due to
their identity being commodified by LLMs. The joy of coding is felt
no more because a novice could just one‑shot your project that took
dozens, if not hundreds of human hours to build. Who are you then, if
not a much slower slop machine? You should just quit coding at this
point. Better yet, just throw away your computer and don’t bother
wiping, nothing of value is on it.
…
That sounds real fucking stupid, doesn’t it? And yet, the doomers
would have you believe that humanity is no more, there’s no more
money to be made building software, and we are all hopeless. The
frustration is palpable, I understand that and I’m living it, just
like you. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and the last time my
resume reached an actual person was years ago. I have no industry
connections but from what I’m hearing from people that do, even
that’s not enough to secure an interview.
Geopolitical conflicts are increasing the cost of living to a
ridiculous degree, corporations are believing the AI hype on LinkedIn
and hemorrhaging half their company only to rehire a few months
later, resumes are getting rejected by AI screeners, and yet I
still can’t get behind the loser mindset that humans won’t come
out on top. If all you know is code, it’s time to learn some
new tricks.
When I got my start in the web (and then tech) industry, I was a
self‑taught designer who had cobbled together a few websites with
janky code, dreaming of a career away from retail work. I applied
for and got an apprenticeship[1]…I was the only one in my cohort who
didn’t get job placement afterwards but who cares? I was armed with
more knowledge about web development than I could’ve taught myself in
the same amount of time. In the years since, I’ve analyzed source
code and scrutinized pixels to perfect what I saw in my head
translated to the browser. Becoming stronger in design and
development created opportunities for me I likely wouldn’t have
gotten otherwise:
- like when a startup had to make cuts and the designer and the other
dev got let go, I had double the work but I still had a job for
several more months
- or when I’m given a take‑home test and what I consider to be basic
design is lauded as some achievement because the usual result is
unstyled (this has happened several times)
- or being THE guy designers turn to when they have an ambitious UX
interaction but are unsure how to explain to a dev (and loving that
you can quickly prototype options for them in the browser to either
validate or pivot ideas, thus leading to client delight)
You get the point.
Personally, I thoroughly enjoy coding. Sometimes for the sake of it
but mostly because as a designer who codes, I am able to create
experiences that delight me. I cannot imagine waiting for a developer
to validate my ideas when I could just…do it myself. The agency is
unreal. For the developer who learns how to design, you too will know
this euphoria.
As an avid user of LLMs for the past fews years and an architech
(what I referred to my designer/developer self before "design
engineer" was coined) for the past 15 years, I can say with my whole
chest that machines CANNOT and WILL NOT have taste. This is what
both separates and elevates the human expression above that of mere
machines. Sure, AI companies make it easy to emulate music and film
but are you listening to it? Are you watching it? Assuming you are,
who’s your favorite "artist" or "auteur"? Do you see "them" being
around in five years (usually when cycles like these wane)? Shiny
trinkets that’ll be relegated to the trash bin of history, like NFTs
(and man, I was a fan of NFTs so look at my track record, you’ll
be fine).
Quite frankly, a lot of projects I see on Hacker News are just clones
of a product that made the front page the week prior, and they look
like straight up doo doo. A 2‑pack of ass[2], if you will. Everything
from the domain to the website to the app itself, looks like Claude
or some GPT made it. Uninspiring. Boring.
Are you really gonna let corpo CEOs and the machines bully you into
not coding anymore? Weird flex but, okay. 🕸️