There’s been a lot of discourse lately about the impact of AI on the design profession. Much of it focuses on how different design and development processes are. Where development is a careful construction of pieces into a functioning whole, design is less linear, more divergent, exploratory, and its purpose is different.
I’ve always liked the analogy of building a house. Design is the architecture phase, where ideas are cheap and easy to discard. Construction is a different matter: you’re pouring concrete, and ripping it out a slab is not as straightforward as deleting a wall from your floor plan.
Having spent meaningful time in both the architectural and construction parts of software, a real shift is happening. AI tooling, and especially the models that arrived in late 2025, are effectively turning concrete into clay. Ideas are now as easy (if not easier) to communicate in the final medium: running code.
The process of designing has not changed. I still explore many ideas, discard the majority and repeat the process. I still find more things to consider, and meander and retrace my steps. It’s just that the process is shifting from design tools to code repository a lot more than before, and the result is a higher fidelity artifact that’s in my hands a lot faster.