As a designer, I've designed with code almost every single day this past year, across my company & personal projects.
In 2024, I only made 84 commits, and much of my work still lived in Figma/Adobe.
A lot changed - AI tooling obviously helped. But more than anything, I realized I’ve never had this much fun designing. It has become a hobby rather than just work.
I’m learning faster, iterating more, and making design decisions across more layers of abstraction: interface, system, interaction, infrastructure.
Designing with code is not for everyone. It's just a part of the modern toolkit - and Figma, Adobe, and many other tools are still there to help.
But for me, it has made design feel fluid again, and brought back the same spark I felt when learning Figma for the first time years ago: the realization that I can play an active role in shaping real, helpful products.
Design is getting exponentially closer to its “magic wand” moment, and I’m all for it.
the reality is that for many projects, I start directly w agents, and ideate w md docs! and iterate from there. my take is that primitive UX patterns are and if not will be codified into skill files + into models themselves, meaning as long as u can identify when the generated output doesnt look right, youre okay.
as for tooling i def use skills but a lot of them are higher level workflows skills like “run multiple agents w these separate focuses”, and also a lot of dev tools that i build on my own. hoping to release them to the public soon!