Document: WM-104 P. Webb Category: Industry 2026-09-27 Should developers design? Abstract Design, the practice deemed worthless two decades ago via the tired meme “should designers code?” is now the only way to prove your humanity (and worth?) in the age of slop. Body TL;DR: Yes, absolutely. Developers SHOULD pick up books, courses, and immerse themselves in various disciplines of design; user experience, color theory, typography, &c. The existential crisis some developers are experiencing is due to their identity being commodified by LLMs. The joy of coding is felt no more because a novice could just one‑shot your project that took dozens, if not hundreds of human hours to build. Who are you then, if not a much slower slop machine? You should just quit coding at this point. Better yet, just throw away your computer and don’t bother wiping, nothing of value is on it. … That sounds real fucking stupid, doesn’t it? And yet, the doomers would have you believe that humanity is no more, there’s no more money to be made building software, and we are all hopeless. The frustration is palpable, I understand that and I’m living it, just like you. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley and the last time my resume reached an actual person was years ago. I have no industry connections but from what I’m hearing from people that do, even **that’s** not enough to secure an interview. Geopolitical conflicts are increasing the cost of living to a ridiculous degree, corporations are believing the AI hype on LinkedIn and hemorrhaging half their company only to rehire a few months later, resumes are getting rejected by AI screeners, and yet I **still** can’t get behind the loser mindset that humans won’t come out on top. If all you know is code, it’s time to learn some new tricks. When I got my start in the web (and then tech) industry, I was a self‑taught designer who had cobbled together a few websites with janky code, dreaming of a career away from retail work. I applied for and got an apprenticeship[1]…I was the only one in my cohort who didn’t get job placement afterwards but who cares? I was armed with more knowledge about web development than I could’ve taught myself in the same amount of time. In the years since, I’ve analyzed source code and scrutinized pixels to perfect what I saw in my head translated to the browser. Becoming stronger in design **and** development created opportunities for me I likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise: - like when a startup had to make cuts and the designer and the other dev got let go, I had double the work but I still had a job for several more months - or when I’m given a take‑home test and what I consider to be basic design is lauded as some achievement because the usual result is unstyled (this has happened several times) - or being THE guy designers turn to when they have an ambitious UX interaction but are unsure how to explain to a dev (and loving that you can quickly prototype options for them in the browser to either validate or pivot ideas, thus leading to client delight) You get the point. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy coding. Sometimes for the sake of it but mostly because as a designer who codes, I am able to create experiences that delight me. I cannot imagine waiting for a developer to validate my ideas when I could just…do it myself. The agency is unreal. For the developer who learns how to design, you too will know this euphoria. As an avid user of LLMs for the past fews years and an _architech_ (what I referred to my designer/developer self before "design engineer" was coined) for the past 15 years, I can say with my whole chest that machines CANNOT and WILL NOT have **taste**. This is what both separates and elevates the human expression above that of mere machines. Sure, AI companies make it easy to emulate music and film but are you listening to it? Are you watching it? Assuming you are, who’s your favorite "artist" or "auteur"? Do you see "them" being around in five years (usually when cycles like these wane)? Shiny trinkets that’ll be relegated to the trash bin of history, like NFTs (and man, I was a fan of NFTs so look at my track record, you’ll be fine). Quite frankly, a lot of projects I see on Hacker News are just clones of a product that made the front page the week prior, and they look like straight up doo doo. A 2‑pack of ass[2], if you will. Everything from the domain to the website to the app itself, looks like Claude or some GPT made it. Uninspiring. Boring. 📸[Your AI slop bores me][IMG1] Are you really gonna let corpo CEOs and the machines bully you into not coding anymore? Weird flex but, okay. 🕸️ References [1] [2] [IMG1]