I started as a software engineer at Palantir before I moved into design, and I never fully put the code down. I still ship the front end myself - this site is React, Next, and Tailwind, and I wrote all of it.
For a long time that felt like a quirk. Lately it feels like an advantage that’s becoming available to everyone. The gap between a design and the running thing is where intent gets lost - in handoff docs, in “that’s not what I meant,” in the small interactions that never make it into a mockup. When the person who designed it can also build it, that gap closes.
AI is making this less rare. A designer who knows what good looks like can now get a working prototype in front of people in an afternoon, and tighten it in the browser where the real decisions live. Not every designer needs to become an engineer. But the ones who can move a few steps into implementation - even with an agent doing the typing - will set the pace.
The point was never the code. It’s that taste applied all the way through to the shipped product is worth far more than taste that stops at the redline.