· Design
My journey with AI coding agents as a product designer
I was hanging out with my designer friends recently and noticed something. Many of my product designer friends are still using Figma to create high-fidelity user interfaces. Only one other designer and I are using AI coding tools to work directly in code.
Before my journey started, I’d been learning HTML, CSS, and Tailwind CSS with the goal of making my design into a real-life responsive user interface. I’m fascinated by how fluid a browser screen is. That’s something Figma can’t fully capture that. So, I was wondering how I could bridge the gap between designer and engineer. I want to make sure the UI, and the solution we design are practical for implementation, and also keep the style the way we want.
One day, my partner, who has been using AI agents for coding for a long time, suggested I try using AI for UI design. I started creating a web prototype from designs of my freelance project. I directed AI to turn the workflow I’ve designed from Figma into a live clickable prototype. But I didn’t stop there. I also used AI to help me build landing pages with the design preferences I have in mind.
At this point, people might think this is the end of the product designer since we can tell AI to create any design we want. But what designers have that AI doesn’t is taste. You can use your taste to make AI do the design you’ve envisioned. Use AI to brainstorm ideas, make quick prototypes, and iterate quickly.
AI is a pattern recognition tool. It doesn’t think about the whole workflow of the application experience. It doesn’t know what should be the primary action of the particular workflow. It doesn’t have empathy or feelings to know which direction is a better experience. Those come from skill and experience. People who can do great work know how to use AI to create great results. So, if you don’t know what a good design is and delegate all your thinking to AI, I’m pretty sure your product will have a disastrous design.
Why am I so sure? Because I’ve seen this firsthand. I once had to fix an app that had been vibe coded with AI by someone with no design background. The app let users jump ahead to the next phase of a workflow, but they couldn’t do anything there unless they’d finished the earlier one. So, They’d land on a screen full of buttons they couldn’t press with no explanation. Even the primary buttons were inconsistent, purple on some screens, green on others. The code worked, but the experience was a mess. AI can produce great design or terrible design. The difference is who’s directing it.
The more I use it, the more confident I am that AI won’t replace designers. It’s just a tool to help me move forward to the way I’d never had imagined before.