I Thought This Was a Dev Thing

I remember when AI was first rolling out and developers really took to it. They were using it in their IDEs, shipping faster, talking about how cutting edge and transformative it was. That’s where AI lived at first, at least from where I was sitting. Behind scary terminals, lines of code, and a steep learning curve that assumed you already knew how to code.

I was encouraged to try Cursor at one point. We had a whole design team meeting about it. One of our more technically inclined coworkers walked us through all the steps. I could use it, eh technically. But finding real value in AI at that time was tough. It was slow. Clunky. And it was mainly built around web workflows, which didn’t help much when I was the mobile designer on the team.

Honestly, AI at this time reminded me of old school Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver was exciting at one point in time. It was supposed to be this wonderful and magical bridge between design and code, and well, it delivered. Technically. The output was typically a beautiful site built from spaghetti code that nobody wanted to touch. Vibe coding, yeah I’ve heard of her before.

Meanwhile, Figma existed. Reusable components, real interactivity, fast, reliable, built specifically for what product designers do every day. We had great engineers on the team who were clearly talented and capable of implementing our designs. So why would I spend time learning a complicated AI tool that didn’t fit my workflow, wasn’t built for my platform, and didn’t solve any problem I actually had?

It just didn’t click. And honestly, I didn’t try very hard to make it click.

To be honest, I wasn’t wrong. Not entirely. The first wave of AI tools genuinely wasn’t built for designers. We were an afterthought, secondary users of tools designed for engineers, expected to find value in workflows that weren’t ours. The learning curve was real. The friction was real. The payoff for designers specifically was unclear because nobody was building AI tools for us.

That changed. Figma Make, Google Stitch, and Claude were released with designers in mind. Meeting us where we already work and think. The second wave didn’t ask us to learn a new paradigm, it came to us. Designers went from an AI afterthought to target audience, and that shift matters more than people are giving it credit for.

This is where my AI story begins. Not with a moment of brilliant revelation, but with the honest admission that I was unconvinced for a long time. I had real reasons for my doubts. If you’re a designer who still feels that way, I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong about AI. I’m here to tell you what eventually changed my mind, and why I think designers who figure this out aren’t giving something up. They’re picking something up. Broadening their horizons.

The role of a designer doesn’t shrink in an AI world. It grows. But you have to be in the room for that to matter.