The Role, Not the Title

What I want to talk about is how the UX/UI role is changing. It is turning into something closer to a product designer, a product engineer, or a front-end engineer. I have been saying this for the past few years.

People who cannot code often cannot produce well-documented designs. If someone does not understand how to align a handful of elements in a sensible way, they do not really know how to design it. My basic point has always been that we should understand how things work before we design them. Not fully, because you can never understand someone's entire project, but at least enough to know how it could be built with code.

That understanding is a great chance to stand out. With AI, doing things and building things has become very easy. People keep building and sharing. I built this, I shipped that, X, Y, and Z. But few of them know why they were building it in the first place.

So it is time to shift the thinking. In the past, the idea was that you should know some coding to be a good UX/UI designer. Now the role is shifting further. We need to understand the business and the product the way a product manager does. It is not about the title or the designation. It is about the role and the responsibility, because AI does not take responsibility for its work. We do, and that is something we have to be careful about.

There is a lot still to come. So far there has been no single huge change, but the models keep getting more capable. It is not really intelligence, but they understand context far better than they did in December 2025. There is a lot to learn and a lot to explore.

I hope we can become unicorn-level UX/UI designers, and I think this is a great moment to start building things and to fix the boring work too. In the past, people rarely spent much time optimizing something like onboarding, because they were trying to optimize things they had never built themselves. Now we can build and optimize at the same time.

This is a great time in human history. We can try things quickly and learn quickly. Yes, there is plenty of funny LinkedIn AI slop, and it gets boring at some point, but that is the reality. I am genuinely happy to go in this direction. I used to expect every UX/UI designer to reach some level of coding. Now it is becoming more than that, and a UX/UI designer can ship the front-end code as well. This is the time for anyone to execute great things.