It’s interesting that what you’re describing—detailed requirements, edge cases, tradeoffs, user-facing considerations—maps closely onto what design disciplines have been doing for decades. As implementation gets automated, if the remaining hard problems are fundamentally about problem definition rather than problem solving, I hope (perhaps naively) that this means designers and engineers might start exploring this territory together rather than separately.
I think this will probably lead to even less working together, since synchronous meetings are a huge bottleneck when designers can just prototype something with a coding agent and then throw it over the fence for a maintainable implementation from engineers.
I would never dare to suggest more meetings. I drown in meetings as is. I meant less that the process changes and more that design expertise becomes more visibly valuable, given that designers have been solving these issues professionally for a long time and have a lot of valuable insight that is often otherwise siloed away from engineers.
It’s interesting that what you’re describing—detailed requirements, edge cases, tradeoffs, user-facing considerations—maps closely onto what design disciplines have been doing for decades. As implementation gets automated, if the remaining hard problems are fundamentally about problem definition rather than problem solving, I hope (perhaps naively) that this means designers and engineers might start exploring this territory together rather than separately.
I think this will probably lead to even less working together, since synchronous meetings are a huge bottleneck when designers can just prototype something with a coding agent and then throw it over the fence for a maintainable implementation from engineers.
I would never dare to suggest more meetings. I drown in meetings as is. I meant less that the process changes and more that design expertise becomes more visibly valuable, given that designers have been solving these issues professionally for a long time and have a lot of valuable insight that is often otherwise siloed away from engineers.
Yeah, I agree, and I actually think designers might stay useful longer than software engineers at this point.