Classic Design is Over

I started designing in Fireworks, coding in Dreamweaver. Then Photoshop. Then I'd painstakingly slice up PSDs and rebuild them in code, pixel by pixel, praying the browser wouldn't break everything. That was the job. Design in one place, build in another, and hope the two worlds could meet somewhere in the middle.

For years, we refined this separation. The tools got better — Sketch, then Figma — but the fundamental ritual stayed the same: designers design, developers develop, and we all sit in handoff meetings pretending the Figma file will translate perfectly into code. It never did.

I don't work like that anymore.

The shift happened quietly, then all at once. I started building sites directly in Framer and realized I was shipping faster — and the results were better — than anything I'd handed off before. No translation layer. No lost intent. Just the thing itself, live.

Then came agentic coding. Claude Code. Codex. Suddenly I wasn't just making websites. I was making apps. Actual software. Things I would've needed a team for, I could now build in a weekend.

This is the part that's hard to explain to designers still living in the old paradigm: I can build anything now. Not "design" it and hope someone builds it. Build it.

The internet feels early again. That's the best way I can describe it. There's this energy — chaotic, fast, hard to keep up with — that reminds me of when the web was still weird and experimental. Before everything got templated and systematized. We're back in the garage.

Here's my hot take, and I know some designers will push back on this:

Designers should design in code.

Not because code is sacred. Not because everyone needs to be an engineer. But because the wall between "design" and "build" was always artificial, and now we finally have tools that let us tear it down. Agentic CLIs, no-code builders, AI that writes and explains and iterates with you — these aren't replacements for design thinking. They're extensions of it.

Classic design — the kind where you push pixels in a silo and hope for the best — is over.

Agentic design is here.

And honestly?

It's more fun.