The most exciting and exhausting time to be a designer
The cost of keeping up when everything is changing
Something I’ve been noticing myself, and hearing from other designers over the last few months: you’re doing genuinely interesting work, leaning into new AI tools, shipping at pace, yet still quietly feeling behind. I wanted to explore what’s driving this.
The challenge is that several things are moving at once. You’re expected to be technically fluent and ahead of the curve on AI. Not just aware of the tools, but deeply knowledgeable and using them. Prototyping in code, shipping working software, keeping pace with a landscape that reshapes itself every few weeks.
At the same time, you’re still expected to be a world-class designer. Now that anyone can ship, the bar is only going up — for craft, for taste, for the thousand small decisions that make products feel great.
Both are full-time jobs.
Underneath that, software foundations are shifting. As agentic AI gathers momentum, designers increasingly have to consider how the products we build are used by AI systems, not just people. That changes some basic assumptions. What a product even is. Whether we need a UI at all. What an experience looks like when the ‘user’ might be an agent acting on someone’s behalf.
Alongside that, role boundaries are blurring. Designers are expected to operate further up the stack. Setting direction, owning outcomes, defining impact in business terms. The bar isn’t just higher on craft and technical fluency. It’s higher on judgement, on influence, on deciding what’s worth doing in the first place.
No wonder it’s exhausting.
To be clear, this is also the most interesting and rewarding design problem of most of our careers. Figuring out what quality means when the build is cheap, and the user might not be human, is genuinely exciting. The exhaustion and the excitement are running in parallel.
I recently wrote about how we design when the code writes itself, focused on the operational shifts, where design’s value concentrates when agents own the middle of the build. This article is about the feeling underneath the changes we are all navigating in real time.
The ground has been moving under design for years. Boundaries with PM and engineering blurring. The definition of what a designer actually does in flux. Titles and levels matter less, we’re basically all just builders now.
What feels different now is the speed.
In the last few months, the productivity gap for people using agentic tooling has become hard to ignore. Steve Yegge, quoted recently by Garry Tan, puts it at 10x to 100x as productive as engineers using tools like Cursor today, and far beyond what teams could do in earlier eras. The exact multiplier doesn’t matter. Everyone in the building can feel the shift.
At Intercom, we’ve made this explicit. The goal is to double the productivity of the whole R&D organisation through AI, and to treat that as a real target across every discipline. It’s demanding, and it’s shared. Engineers are learning to direct and review code they didn’t write line by line. PMs are taking on new categories of decision. The rewiring is happening to everyone.
For designers, it has a particular shape. Execution speed has to go up, and the craft bar has to go up at the same time. When the build is cheap, taste is what separates anything worth shipping from generic output. Both rising together is what creates the bind. The sense of exhaustion has two main sources.
The first is internal. When everyone is chasing 2x, the most visible version of progress is engineering velocity. PRs merged, features shipped. It’s easy to assume that’s the ruler you should use for yourself. But the more useful framing is idea to customer. How long it takes to go from an idea to something in users’ hands that actually matters. Most of that distance is judgement, not output.
“Ideally I’d like to measure how long it takes us, on average, to bring something from idea to being in the hands of our customers.”
— Darragh Curran
The second source is cultural, and more relentless. The AI corner of design Twitter and every internal Slack channel runs on a constant drip of ‘look at what I shipped this weekend’, new tool, new workflow, new prototype in an afternoon. It’s exciting but it’s a perfect engine for making anyone who pauses to think feel like they’re falling behind. Meanwhile the craft side of the feed is relentless in its own way; refactoring entire IAs, novel patterns and interactions, beautifully executed details. Two feeds, two bars, both climbing.
There’s also a quieter cost: obsolescence. The workflows you learn today have a short half-life. Teams at the edge are rewriting their assumptions every few months because what worked before quickly becomes irrelevant. That creates a kind of background fatigue. A sense that if you’re not keeping up, you’re slipping.
Brian Lovin described this as context-switch exhaustion. Always updating, always reacting, with the feeling that if you’re not actively prompting, you’re wasting time.
“This is the most distracted I’ve ever been and it is the most context switch exhaustion I’ve ever felt”
— Brian Lovin, Notion
It’s the kind of treadmill that punishes mastery. You learn something, get good at it, and within a couple of quarters it’s gone.
His response is the one that feels right. Stop attaching to specific workflows. Focus on understanding why things are changing and how the underlying systems work. The tools are downstream of that.
The counter-signal worth holding onto is that judgement is becoming the scarce resource.
In a world where the build is cheap, the value isn’t in keeping up with engineering speed. It’s in the judgement calls. What’s actually good. What’s worth building. Who or what it’s for. Those decisions decide whether anything ships at all.
Which is why the bind is a trap. It feels like it has a solution on its own terms. Go faster, learn more tools, ship more, hold the bar higher, and you’ll catch up. But you can run yourself into the ground trying to be both the frontier technologist and the craft specialist in their fullest forms, while the real leverage for design, the integration of all of it, gets less attention.
There’s probably a correction of some sort coming. The pace isn’t sustainable. When things settle, the advantage won’t belong to whoever knows the latest tool. It will belong to whoever understands the fundamentals, can carve out a few hours of clear, focused work each day, building, judging, deciding, with the tools rather than chasing them.
So lean in on the tools. Get fluent. That part isn’t optional. But stop holding yourself to two separate scorecards as if they were independent disciplines. In this moment, they’re the same thing. Technical fluency is how you hold the craft bar, because the craft is now about shaping and judging machine output at speed, and deciding what should exist in the first place. And don’t forget to go outside once in a while and touch some grass.
The designers who come out of this strongest won’t be the ones who ran hardest on either axis. They’ll be the ones who stayed clear-headed enough, and rested enough, to do the judgement work that actually compounds.
For all the challenges, this truly is a remarkable moment to be a designer. The tools have never been more powerful. The range of what a small team can build has never been wider. The questions we get to work on; what a product should even be, what quality means when anyone can build anything, what good looks like for an agent economy, are genuinely new.
Designers who can hold the craft bar and shape the direction of the work will have more influence over what gets built than at any point I can remember. That’s not a consolation prize for surviving the bind. It’s the reason the bind exists in the first place.
The job is changing. The people aren’t going anywhere. The trick is noticing when the exhaustion is pointing you somewhere useful, and when it’s just noise.
If you read this and it still sounds exciting , we’re hiring for many roles in our team in Dublin, London and Berlin.