I’ve designed at both ends - small teams where I could take an idea to something live in a day, and larger organizations where most of the work was communicating intent across a lot of people. The difference was never talent. It was the length of the loop.
At a small org, the loop is short. You think of something, build a rough version, react to the real thing, and adjust. At a large org, that loop tends to run through Figma. The mockup becomes the system of record - the artifact everyone aligns around - and a surprising amount of the job becomes producing and maintaining that artifact rather than the product itself.
I think that’s about to feel strange. A lot of what Figma is for - high-fidelity screens that communicate and align - exists because building the real thing was expensive. When every designer has a capable agent that can prototype alongside them in real time, that expense drops. You don’t mock the screen; you make a working version and feel it. The big organizations that are deeply invested in a Figma-shaped process will have to shake it up, and the ones that do will move a lot faster.
As making gets cheaper, the questions move up. Less “produce the mockup,” more “what should we make, for whom, and does it feel right in the hand?” The work designers lead becomes taste, judgment, and framing - deciding what is worth building and where the bar sits - not artifact production.
Personally, I think this makes design more fun. The feedback loop is the smallest it has ever been. The gap Ira Glass described - between your taste, what you can imagine, and what you can actually bring to life - is the smallest I’ve felt it, maybe gone. What you can picture and what you can ship are converging. That’s the most exciting thing about designing right now.