Am I still a designer?

I’ve been in a bit of an identity crisis lately.

What is design? What is a designer?

What is the design process in the age of AI? Not really what are the tools, workflow, steps or flow. But what processes or outputs are needed for us to look back and say “a designer cooked here”.

What is the goal of the work?

How do you demonstrate competence?

Am I a designer?

When Fable launched last year my workflow blew up. I’d done quite a bit of prototyping, exploration, and built some cool stuff with AI in the past, but nearly all of it was mediocre, frustrating, buggy or just bad design. The AI constantly added bloated components, ugly states, fragile code, and messy prototypes.

I had been working in an amalgam of Figma, Framer, Notion, v0, and (insert AI tool). Was it better than before AI? Kinda?

I could maybe get away with an inline component or two, or a fun throwaway micro-interaction, but complex UI just wasn’t on the table. I had to draw a box for the AI to work inside of, but there’s no way that I was going to let it build out more than a part of my product. It was better in the way a new prototyping tool or feature launch of a design tool was better. Very incremental, but not distinct, especially in hindsight.

But Fable + Claude code… well that changed things.

That was different.

I was able to ship. Like, actually ship. Not just a no-code prototype or app, but like an actual, working, complex, real app or feature.

By myself.

Building was possible, complexity was approachable. Systems could be created, edge cases could be explored. Things that were off the table before (3d, auth, billing, external tools, databases, etc) suddenly became a potential tool in my workflow. Anything that was code could be created. So my design work became code work.

It shifted out of design tools as the starting point and into design tools as the refining point, with the majority of artifacts and prototypes living in branches, local code builds, and preview links. I didn’t have a single place to find my designs, as each new idea forced the use of new tools. I didn’t have a single workflow.

The collaboration with AI also changed dramatically.

I went from "You are a senior developer… blah blah" or "This div <id="example"> needs to be aligned to the right side inside of this container…"

to

"Move the button to the right, add adjacent common actions"
"add a modal, make sure it works on mobile"
"improve the settings page it’s bloated"
"simplify the onboarding flow steps, based on conversion rate"
"show me 20 versions of that popover"
"make this page load faster, don’t stop until it’s under 1 second"

I started then building entire apps from scratch with AI. Not just a single flow, but every possible flow. All screens, connections, even integrations and server functions.

In the former way of working I had to give AI everything it needed to know in order to implement the code. I needed to think everything through, I needed to know all the edge cases, all the button permutations, all the rows, popovers, tooltips etc.

I had to know everything, and the AI had to build it. And I had to come already bearing mockups, user flows, screens, etc. I had to approach it as if it was a single developer — limited scope, mostly thought through.

With the latter my job was to tell it where things were wrong. To start with it, saying "I kinda want to build this, but I’m not sure…". To embrace the "not quite" or "oh that’s not bad, but it could be…" the "I have no idea, just don’t stop until you figure it out and test the results". To rely on it to help with the rough scaffold and to start with the initial sloppy versions.

To skip the work I was doing before in a canvas altogether, and instead to rely on that expressive space for a single flow or piece. It was an inversion of the model I had before.

No longer needing to think through all the complexity in search of implementation.

Instead coming with a loose problem, and relying on it to aid in the complexity variance and then run the implementation.

I shifted from an instructor of a single musician to a conductor of the whole orchestra.

Someone giving nudges, assuming that the players are professionals, someone who could say abstract things and be sloppy with my critiques, assuming the "musicians" would get it. Taking for granted that I wasn’t talking to a soloist, but rather to a unit who understands playing together. For me, it meant I didn’t have to know how to play every instrument, I just needed to conduct, emphasize, trim, direct, influence... and then bow at the end.

But the conductor is not a musician.

The conductor is not a player.

Design, before, was about being the player.

So what am I now?

How does one demonstrate that they’re a good conductor? How do you show that you know how to wave a baton? (no really, how does a conductor show that I’m seriously asking)

Or am I a composer?

Okay, I’ll stop with the music metaphor, that’s gonna be hard to keep up.

I’ve found myself questioning the output of my work as a designer in this new world. Is it the prototype, the design system, the work along the way or the final product that ships?

If it’s the final product, what mechanism do I have to show that progress of work? How do I demonstrate my line of thinking that led to a final result? Do I need to at all?

In my old way of working, the best I could do was to influence the product direction. To observe and to write the music (oh here I go again) but rely on others to play it.

Being the composer/song writer meant I was the one who decided what should be played, but not the one who gets to play. Developers held the trumpet, played the violin, made the music come to life. The song was never the notes on the page, it was only real if you could hear the music. No matter how familiar I was with the tune, I could never actually play. I wasn’t a singer-songwriter.

I wasn’t a developer-designer.

I couldn’t play, I couldn’t sing, but I could compose, play some chords, and I could for sure hear when the song was played in the wrong key, when it was too slow, when it didn’t hit the audience like I wanted to.

But now, well now things are different.

Now I’m the conductor.

Still not the one playing on stage, but the one that causes all the musicians to be consistent, on pace, working together. The one who knows that they didn’t make the music or play the notes, but the one who can actually direct it and bring it to life.

Our work has shifted. I’m no longer able to go back to the old ways of working. I can’t just design the idea anymore, I want to actually build it.

But does that mean I’m not a designer anymore? Or does that mean designers can be more?

I’m not saying design is dead. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not ceding the need for someone to have the concept, see it through, and write the music to the machines anytime soon. But the work. The work to write it has changed.

I’ve realized lately that I’ve lost the artifacts that used to show that work. I’ve lost the train of decisions along the way—the messy canvas of ideas. I still have the artifacts that Claude puts on the canvas, but the decisions aren’t as easy to spot and the inflection points of the ideas are not as apparent. Looking back at my work over the last year things are much more fleshed out, much more fully formed. There’s no longer a need to riff through 20 different versions of a row component, there’s only a need for the final version.

But I can’t spot the big moments. I can’t show the "here’s how I got here". I can’t show the mistakes or the random ideas — not because they didn’t exist, but because they were removed as soon as I prompted "nah, get rid of that idea, let’s try it this way".

Is that a bad thing?

When I go back into design files from even a decade ago, I can see the way I thought through the problem visually. It’s easy to see where I was exploring ideas, and for many of them it’s even possible to load the old prototypes and (maybe this is a me thing) shake my head at the weird ideas that I had that turned out later to be mistakes. It’s more obvious to see where ideas were abandoned too early or the wrong idea was pursued for too long. The meat of the design process was there, but I don’t have that anymore.

I first started to notice it when I was remaking my portfolio recently. There was a massive amount of design detritus from everything I’ve made over the years until I got to my recent work. In my recent work there was… just the app. Where were the explorations? The decisions? The abandoned ideas along the way? The passionate pursuit of a new or novel way of showing information?

Was that because I stopped working?

Was that because I did less work?

That couldn’t be it… I’d argue that I’ve made more design work in the last 3 months than the previous 3 years… but where’s the evidence?

Where… was my work?

Where did the design happen?

Does being a designer mean that you have a canvas of forgotten or half-baked ideas?

Does it mean that you have 100 different explorations of a single icon?

Or does it mean that you found a real problem, made a real product, that you created, that you shipped, that you built, that you saw people using?

That you made something real, not just the shape of it. That you created and heard the music played, and it didn’t just stay notes on the sheet?

Am I still a designer?

Are you?