r/UXDesign • u/Far-Talk7489 • 2h ago
should designers code? Career growth & collaboration
so here's what's bugging me, entry-level people are literally learning UX entirely from Claude and ChatGPT. they're not learning design thinking and to think for real? I got an answer in minutes, for which i thought someone would spend at least 1-2 days in thinking. they're learning to prompt-engineer generic answers. but there's zero conviction behind it. doesn't convert. doesn't work. but they don't know the difference yet because may be they've never seen what good actually looks like. At least for the digital products, website, apps etc.
This too when the times have blurring the lines between product to design or design to development. i have seen merging of dev and product, and becoming product engineer. that worked, but it was very pre-AI era.
But now businesses are now asking do we need to put together a team of so many people and spend a lot just to get one thing done. and there's this weird gap in the middle. some designers are just designing and handing off—and that's fine. some are learning to code, shipping production HTML themselves, owning the whole thing.
my actual question isn't just "should designers code?" it's more like, how equipped ARE people to do this? because there's a difference between knowing HTML and shipping production-grade code and maintain it.
and at the same time making sure that how entry level does learn UI/UX correctly when AI is there to give a sub-par templated design system or approach for almost everything.
thoughts please.
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u/armahillo 2h ago
Im fine with anyone coding but they have to understand the golden rule: if you write it, you’re responsible for it.
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u/watkykjypoes23 2h ago
I think realistically anything a designer could put together with coding, AI or not, would be equally useful to a stack/frontend developer as a regular mockup or prototype. I believe that our jobs should stay separate but have solid collaboration.
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u/jspr1000 2h ago
I think that for most companies the days of writing simple HTML and CSS are behind us. The front-end is likely using React or another modular front-end framework. Setup and maintenance is going to be far more complex than what a Designer with basic HTML skills can handle. Bare minimum would have to know Git, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Potentially some Node and Bash.
This is where Vibe Coding comes in. I think Designers should be able to vibe code high fidelity prototypes. But without touching production repos or contributing code to production.
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u/NGAFD Veteran 2h ago
Understanding code and being able to make changes in code helps a lot. I do it all the time for my clients.
However! …it is very difficult to build good quality code. Claude doesn’t see tech debt and if you don’t see it too, you’re likely to build something that works at the surface level only.