Being a designer in a makers world
How designers stay essential in a world where agentic tools let everyone make at breakneck speeds.
It's about to blow up
Microsoft recently announced1 the latest Copilot and it worries me. I've been tracking their progress for a while, with features seemingly 6 months behind the frontier lab super-apps at any given time, but now they're catching up and finally bringing real agents to the table.
If it was anyone else I'd shrug it off, because even in the US, fewer than half of employees say their organisations have integrated AI tools — let alone got the shiny Codex, Claude or Cursors.2 The AI labs know this and are trying hard to consultancy their way into the generic business market.3 But Microsoft catching up feels different to me. They run the world outside of tech with armies of Thinkpads, and Copilot will be pre-approved by nature of being part of the operating system.
Agentic use is about to blow up. We're about to see a boom of single-use software and prototypes of ideas, most of it made with one of the worst performing agentic harnesses on the market, and designers aren't ready for it.
In the first few minutes of Katie Dill's (Head of Design, Stripe) recent talk How to scale intent, quality and artistry with AI4 she describes a great analogy between our situation today and the building boom post-WW2 — where the urgency to develop led to copy-pasting lower and lower quality architecture that still surrounds us:
"After World War II, with urgency to build and new construction methods, the [building styles of the past] were essentially copied again and again without intentionality. The thinking got thinner and thinner, and all that was left were generic patterns ill suited to the context at hand."
At the end of her talk she advocates that AI should help us raise the ceiling, not just the floor. It's a great message for Silicon Valley; but for the rest of the world I would argue the floor is more urgent.
We need to figure out how to make better design an assumption and not just an addition. We need to find opportunities to empower those around us instead of being seen as a barrier — or else accidentally encourage people to skirt around and ignore design altogether; which is a problem we already face and can't afford making worse. We've fought hard for a seat at the table, let's not give it up because the conversation is uncomfortable.
Everyone's a designer
As I've become more senior over time I have been known to advocate that everyone is a designer in pursuit of more makers and innovators adopting design-led practices. No matter your role, you designed something; whether it was codebases, workflows, buildings or spreadsheets. In the end, we're all just solving problems.
I still know this to be true, that anything in our built world not made by nature is designed by humanity — whether or not the creator resonated with a design title.
"There is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere"5 — Bill Moggridge, IDEO Co-Founder
For me, agentic prototyping and engineering6 have changed this calculus a bit. If the 2010's were about the laymen pitching app ideas to their tech friends, the 2020's have become instead about making the app ideas themselves. It's now far less likely a person identifying as a designer will ever be involved.
This is good and bad
Good: Value in society
Prototyping can be approached by anybody, whether you're a product manager dreaming of a feature or a business user creating a plugin for the app you use daily. Problems will get solved at increasing rates and specificity to a domain, and the world will be better off for it — on paper.
Bad: Society feels worse
You don't need a dedicated person with taste and design sensibility on a team anymore. Suddenly, everyone is their own designer. My advocacy finally realised, yay! — but I didn't know it would also mean we lose our voice in the process. The interfaces humans have with the world will be more efficient, but be void of taste, art and play. We move one step closer to a capitalist utopia of efficiency maximisation, but a built environment that nobody will enjoy interacting with.
We've already seen it play out:
- slop advertisements or posters small businesses are churning out
- your most AI-pilled ex-colleague's posts on LinkedIn
- your cousin twice-removed creating a semi-responsive web app for his mates fantasy football league These things solve problems and create localised value, it's true, but they do so in ways that miss the intentionality of design.
If this is the future of interface between society and humanity, I'd want to do everything I can to make it better. You should too. How might we raise the floor for all of these new makers?
How did we get here
The euphoria of making beyond boundaries
The tools for making have exploded in the last few years, and it's come with an intoxicating allure of freedom, enticing many — including myself — to make beyond our original capabilities. Often creating ideas in excess, just to explore the new world of the possible. Those who had been held back by the requisites of technology but burdened with infinite creativity now exist in a utopia of possibility.
In his MIT HCI seminar Apps and programming,7 Andy Matuschak quotes Nio Ono on their experience in this new world:
Vibe coding unlocked something in my mind or latent personality matrix. I am reminded of descriptions by people who feel they were fundamentally changed by martial arts or some esoteric practice, like something inside of me realigned and connected me to an inner conduit of energy that had lain dormant. … I feel unleashed in a way that changes my sense of self. There is an unambiguous before and after. … I feel free to act! To express myself! … 'I feel the body electric' is as perfect a summation of this feeling as anything.
An entrepreneurial spirit innate to the imaginative among us is no longer filtered by experience, or adjacent required skills. And it's thrilling, to say the least.
AI-enduced behaviours
In 2023, psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard warned that generative AI chatbots might generate delusions in people prone to psychosis.8 The idea of AI Psychosis has since been popularised through things like Eddy Burback's ChatGPT made me delusional,9 raising awareness of a disturbing side effect of human-like tools and mental models.
Recent literature describes the risk as chatbots validating or amplifying delusional or grandiose content, particularly in people already vulnerable to psychosis.10 Some of the interesting or concerning things I've seen online about this include:
- The
#keep4obacklash when GPT-4o was replaced with GPT-5, and the emotional dependency many had to the model11 - A piece by The Observer on AI as a mental health crisis, likening the phenomenon of delusion around new technologies to delusions of 1300s France where people thought they were made of glass12
- Reddit's /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI - submitted here without comment13
Typically this kind of behaviour has been enabled by older models that are described as psychophantic, where it's easiest to cite 2024's GPT-4 or earlier Claude variants.
I find psychosis a relevant but ultimately too negative adjacent term to the phenomena I've described in this writing so far when it comes to design and makers.
Euphoric-Myopia
I propose Euphoric-Myopia as a pseudo-scientific term to more accurately describe how many makers using agentic tooling are not confusing reality with fiction, but are simply unaware of the complexities of the reality in which they have created something new — acknowledging of its being driven by an addictive lust.
Based on a flip side to their earlier expression, Nio Ono was again quoted by Andy in his talk about the antithesis of their journey:
I live in an eternal present. No memory, no plan. Every minute my attention lunges at something else. It's hard to recount what even happened these last few months. For all this activity, I feel bereft of outcomes or memories. I feel disembodied, so my embodied life is in disrepair. My home is my screen, so my living space is dusty and incomplete. I feel robbed of agency. I can scarcely recognize my own goals, let alone act on them. It's like forgetting a past life. The world feels like a blurry backdrop for my screens. It's all desktop wallpaper.
With emotional burnout and such obsessive behaviours, I consider this idea deserving of a different name due to its emergent comparability to addiction, albeit with a much less drastically negative consequence.
Europhic-Myopia often results in the over-engineering of solutions to simplified problems because the process of invention and creation is exciting and enjoyable. This likely means that both individuals and businesses have — and will continue to see — a rise in time invested on divergent and creative solutions to problems, and in tokens burned in API credits, with increasingly diminished returns in value and productivity beyond the initial peaks of intrigue and delight.
We're all still just human
It is really easy to see these behaviours and be dismissive, as many people I admire and respect have been. But I think if we apply empathy to the reality of these maker scenarios, three main principles become clear:
1. Exploration beyond core skills should be encouraged
I've always understood in a product team, the more overlap in the skills of the people, the better; you can be more understanding of the challenges you each face and can even help one another overcome them. The more empathy design has for engineering and vice versa, the more considered a solution can be.
Agentic making is probably the best catalyst for this learning that has, or may ever, face us. With enough encouraging discussion and shared excitement, strict silos in skillsets should soon barely exist in the average team, and the quality of our output will be better off for it.
2. Design was never a given, let's not pretend it was
Design has always had to fight for a seat at the table, and without a Steve Jobs charismatic-type at the helm, very few orgs will ever prioritise it instead of typical capitalist number-go-up thinking.
To most of the world we're still not seen as mandatory. Many only invest in design to improve what they have, not to help it start. Even the largest of organisations — if their core product or service isn't software — can have incredibly low design maturity and mid way through the 2020's may not even have an organised design team at all.
3. Model training has prioritised more expensive capabilities
Labs have focused effort on computer-use, engineering, and more logic-driven use cases that have typically been more expensive than design. It's economical, and a perfect coupling as code outputs fit the token-by-token nature of LLM's quite well.
Generated infographics, agentic landing pages and this whole era of creative outputs look, feel and behave passable but often not desirable because quantifying taste into training data is extremely hard, and so isn't a strength of the models today.
A friend of mine recently described this quite well; If AI models are trained on the entire internet, then using their outputs without critical thought is simply trending towards the norm. But the internet has historically been a cesspool of human opinion, so the norm is actually quite poor, which is still, annoyingly, much better than those untrained could achieve on their own — but much worse than we all deserve.
Design in a world where everyone's a maker
So far in this essay I've claimed:
- We're about to see an explosion of making, and design isn't guaranteed to be part of it
- It's partly because it's euphoric to expand beyond your traditional capabilities
- There are design-shaped holes in what's being made, because we're still human
In any capitalist market, when there's a boom in popularity of something and a clear value-gap, that's an opportunity. Here's how I think this plays out for design:
The centralisation of design
For many regular orgs around the world, I suspect the simplest and easiest route for future design investment will occur through centralisation; such as in the expansion of the role design system teams. (And if you don't already have one, this is a great place to start.)
As a product team is starting to look more and more like a single product manager empowered by agents, using centralised designers, consulted temporarily and helping with new and emerging patterns or use cases, become a cheaper and more strategic path for many businesses. A smaller, centralised team that exists to empower a range of other teams is an easier investment. After all, that's how enterprise services already work.
If not already, systems-thinking is your friend; be prepared to design beyond the scope of a product or a problem in your everyday. Consider how the pattern or concept you're designing can (or can't) adapt to the wider system you're inherit to. Your scaleability matters more than ever before, not just the immediate problem solving.
Teach, not tell
As the ratio of product-people skews further away from designers, our role as the sole-owners of taste becomes detrimental to good interfaces. Many designers however scare our counterparts because we've been raised in brutal critique-cultures, where design crits quickly teach you to leave your ego at the door for the betterment of what's being made.
Most professions don't work like that. The usual open critique of another's work will always be seen more combative than not — and you risk losing the opportunity to influence it at all.
Practice coaching skills; helping identify the highest priority education you can share with someone and focus hard on that, even if other improvements fall to the wayside. Awareness first, education next, suggestion last. Your colleagues might not get it right straight away, and that's okay. Patience is your friend.
Writing your opinions
Whether skills14 remain the most popular agentic documentation vehicle or not going forward, it's hard to argue against the value of writing down your expertise. Whether or not you share it with the world, the things that make your craft yours deserve memorialisation beyond just your brain.
If you have opinions, checklists, quality assurance checks or watch-outs for your own creative process, having them written down will increasingly benefit you as design tasks become feasible with agents.
Personally, I've been writing my own design bible within Obsidian whenever I do something more than twice, so I can start referring back to my opinions, improve them over time, or share them with agents to various levels of success.
Ideally, when or if you're comfortable with your writings, you can:
Contribute to open-source
One of the most socialist and confusing outcomes of the boom of software engineering in the last decades has been the rise of open-source frameworks, tooling and practices.
It's undeniably kept software more approachable and accessible for everyone of any background. But as expensive SoTA models become the default for shipping code, and learning to code manually becomes increasingly niche, this pillar of the free and open internet is at risk of being monetised.
While historically not a risk for designers directly, as design becomes more intertwined with the code that delivers it, we also then start losing the equality in creative opportunity we have become so accustomed to.
As many popular designers already are and developers have been for decades, if you make something bespoke or unique, share it so that anybody may benefit from remixing it for their own learning. A few of my favourite recent examples include:
- Emil Kowalski's15 adaption of his course animations.dev16 and his open-source skills.17
- DialKit18 by Josh Puckett,19 a fantastic visual tool to help designers nail in the feel of designs and animations when working with agents
- The WIP Craft20 design engineering concept library by Gustavo Fior21
What used to be I found this cool design tool called Figma or Here's a sweet plugin I found has evolved into I made this resource for me, and shared it openly and I think that's not only really cool, but a behaviour designers need to all try to adopt.
Most importantly: Be empathetic and empowering
It's easier to challenge than it is to support. Break through that bias and help other makers. Build trust and empower design to be a consideration. When you help others, they'll remember, and will be more likely to include you going forward.
The more substance we can share, the more bridges we build, the better designed the world we will live in. While San Francisco raises the ceiling, everyone else raises the floor. I think that's a beautiful dichotomy.
Doing posts after a decade of doing none
This is a deliberate first blog post for me. While this is a bit of an essay mixed with a call to action, it's also an explanation as to why — after a decade of doing design — I'm finally starting to talk publicly about my opinions (to the excitement of many who have asked me to).
I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, and have various projects in the works to share to the design community. One such being a skill for the basics of accessible form design — a weird speciality I happen to have fallen into.
I'll be continuing to share more and open-sourcing many of my personal projects as well, such as JamSesh22 and various tools and resources I can't live without, and may help at least one other person be 1% better than yesterday.
Authoring notes
- My blog, under my name, is my genuine thoughts in a writing style that represents me and my capacity (or lack thereof) to write. None of the words you have read today were authored by a machine.
- I refuse to accept the em-dash
—as a casualty of the agentic era. Occasionally, I use commas, like this, but it's never quite the same. I'm sure my inconsistent use throughout my writing will be evidence enough I'm still human.
References
Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot, Jared Spataro, Microsoft, 25 September 2026.
Organizational AI Adoption Jumps Six Points, Andy Kemp, Gallup, 20 July 2026.
Introducing the OpenAI Partner Network, OpenAI, 14 June 2026; Building a new enterprise AI services company, Anthropic, 4 May 2026.
How to scale intent, quality and artistry with AI, Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe.
Celebrating Bill Moggridge, Bill Moggridge memorial site, November 2012.
Agentic engineering > 'Vibe coding'. We're better than that.
Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies, Andy Matuschak, MIT HCI seminar, 2026.
Will Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Generate Delusions in Individuals Prone to Psychosis?, Søren Dinesen Østergaard, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 25 August 2023.
ChatGPT made me delusional, Eddy Burback, YouTube.
Artificial intelligence-associated delusions and large language models: risks, mechanisms of delusion co-creation, and safeguarding strategies, Hamilton Morrin and others, The Lancet Psychiatry, 2026.
“Please, don't kill the only model that still feels human”: Understanding the #Keep4o Backlash, Huiqian Lai, arXiv, 2026.
AI psychosis: a mental health crisis for the 21st century, The Observer.
r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, Reddit.
Emil Kowalski's open-source skills, GitHub.
Craft, work-in-progress design engineering concept library.