Where design stands today.
Design has always been two jobs: deciding what should exist, and making it. For most of the discipline’s history the second job took most of the hours. That ratio has flipped.
A competent interface can be generated in minutes. The scarce work has moved upstream: choosing which of ten plausible directions deserves to exist, and being able to say why. Teams that still plan their time around production are planning around the wrong bottleneck.
It changes what a design review is for. We used to review the work. Now we review the decision, and the work is almost incidental.
Prompts, tokens, constraints, acceptance criteria. Designers increasingly author the rules a system follows rather than the artefact itself. The deliverable is less a picture and more a set of instructions precise enough to be carried out by something that does not share your taste.
When options are effectively infinite, judgement is the gate. Process once protected quality by slowing things down; now the slowest, most valuable step is a person who can look at forty variations and know which one is right for this place, this audience, this moment.
Designers ship working code. Engineers generate interfaces. The line between the roles is no longer drawn by which tools each person can use, but by who is accountable for which decisions.
Daylight, embodied carbon and egress are checked continuously while the sketch is still being drawn. The architect’s first move has become a negotiation with live constraints rather than a gesture that gets checked weeks later.
If judgement is the gate, a team needs words for it. Without a shared vocabulary, “taste” quietly becomes another word for seniority: the most senior person in the room picks, and nobody can say why.
The teams that handle abundance well write their judgement down. A short list of what “right” means for this product, this audience, this year, specific enough to disagree with. It is the design equivalent of an eval, and it lets taste scale beyond the people who happen to have it.