Tools change. The work doesn't.
Every week brings a new tool that’s supposedly going to replace designers. Figma. Claude. Cursor. Whatever launched yesterday. The discourse treats each one as either a threat or a savior, and the people pretending there’s a right way to work are missing the point.
They’re pencils. All of them. A sharper pencil doesn’t make you a writer, and a faster one doesn’t make you a designer. The output isn’t the design. It’s just what came from the pencil.
Design is the search for a good fit between a form and its context. The hard part was never generating the form. It was understanding the problem well enough to know what should exist at all. AI can generate something plausible in seconds. It cannot sit with a problem, weigh the tradeoffs, hold the tension, and decide what actually needs to be built. That’s the job.
So I use the pencils. All of them. Figma, Claude, Claude Code, builder.io, whatever lets me move faster and think sharper. The tools change. The work doesn’t. What I care about is keeping the judgment squarely in the seat of the person holding the pencil.
That’s still the job. It’s just a much faster one now.