Is Design Cooked?

This article came up in my feed along with an advert claiming design as a practice is done for as tools like v0 will just let anyone prompt to a product.

I'm not so sure we will cease to exist, but the trend of consolidating roles into one person with ever-increasing output expected will only continue, much like UX, IA architects, Visual Designers, and Interaction Designers have all been squeezed into Product Designers.

I do think these tools will become good, and a lot of businesses will use them. The work pool will get smaller, products will keep shipping, brands will keep being created, and probably businesses will need someone to manage those tools the same way executives still want someone to make their PowerPoint presentations for them.

But, Design is just as much about curating the zeitgeist as it is about the process of making. You can prompt, "Build me Uber for dogs," but you haven't really produced anything novel, or controlled what the hook is. You still need people with the imagination to turn fragile ideas into a solid product. And that requires more than a sentence or two or even a product requirements document to get there.

There is a bigger problem, though, for those businesses. If you offload your thinking and the product development lifecycle to an LLM, you, your team, and your business will not learn anything. You won't know where or how to move next. You will cease to understand what you have "built" as you never built it in the first place.

You will be on version zero till you are zero.