The AI revolution is here. And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve felt the tsunami sweeping across the industry at pace. There’s a shift causing mixed feelings of excitement and anxiety. Roles are changing. Careers are being reshaped. Tools and workflows recreated. And the design process? Yeah, that’s changing too.
The process debate
Don’t Trust the (Design) Process, a piece by Jenny Wen, has been circulating. It throws stones at the old faithful double diamond, a process designers have leaned on for years. Myself included.
In short, what Jenny is arguing: be messy. Skip steps. Do things out of order. Backtrack. Start from the solution. Operate on vibes and intuition. Have a clear and unwavering sense of what good looks like.
It’s an uncomfortable read if you’ve spent years defending the process. But in a world where new tools are collapsing weeks of process into a single afternoon, defending the old sequence feels less convincing.
The process just got messier
Designers are now venturing into territory they were never traditionally assigned. The role of a designer is now expanding. Its becoming less about pushing pixels and more about thinking in systems. The distance between idea and working prototype has collapsed.
Anyone can generate code now. Anyone can prompt their ideas into existence. The jump-to-solution instinct that would have been quietly frowned upon in the past. Getting something real in front of a user (even rough) surfaces the actual problem faster than six weeks of research ever could. Designers no longer need to wait for permission. They can build, test, and find the real problem without following a pre-AI process like gospel.
So what does this mean for designers?
It’s not what can you build.
It’s what should you build, and why.
The ability to act on vibes — that instinct for what good feels like before logic catches up — is no longer a soft skill. It’s the skill. Designers who trust it will move faster, because they know when to build on instinct and when to pause and validate. Research hasn’t lost its value — it’s just stopped being the starting line. It’s the thing you turn to when the stakes, or the uncertainty, demand it.
When anyone can create a fully working prototype, what you choose to make and how you choose to make it is where the real differentiation lives.
The role is expanding, and the process is dissolving with it. The designers who thrive won’t be the ones defending the old diamond — they’ll be the ones who always knew the point was never the process. It was the thing you made, and whether it was any good.