When Engineering Gets Cheap, Design Becomes Priceless

With coding costs dropping to little more than an AI subscription, the industry risks leaning too heavily on brute-force iteration—pushing out endless solutions while overlooking the true value created by design.

Design’s Original Role

Traditionally, research and design existed to reduce the burden on engineering. Designers could move faster than developers—shaping concepts, testing them, and filtering out weak ideas before expensive code was written. This balance protected resources while keeping the user experience in focus.

The New Temptation

Now that code is cheap and fast, the temptation is to compress or even skip design altogether. Why spend time understanding users when you can just build, launch, and iterate until something sticks?

On paper, it sounds efficient. In practice, it risks degrading the user experience—especially for paying customers.

The Human Cost

We’ve already seen this play out. In recent AI rollouts, features people relied on were altered or removed overnight. These weren’t just experiments; they were tools users had built trust and habits around.

Rapid release cycles ignored how deeply people had woven these products into their workflows. It’s ironic: in building stand-ins for human intelligence, companies sometimes forget the very details that make us human—trust, familiarity, and the need for continuity.

The Real Tension

Faster engineering doesn’t automatically equal better products. Yes, I’m excited by AI’s potential to lower costs, speed up ideas, and unlock innovation. But none of that replaces the need to deeply understand users—their needs, context, and mindset.

For decades, the very act of producing interfaces has forced teams to ask:

• Who is this for?
• What do they need?
• How will they navigate it?

When engineering becomes trivial, design thinking becomes essential. Without it, we risk flooding the world with technically advanced but experientially careless solutions.

The Competitive Edge

As AI reduces the cost of engineering, the winners won’t be those who brute-force features. They’ll be the ones who lead with empathy, clarity, and design that respects the human on the other side of the screen.

This is where design leaders must step up—not just to defend our role, but to prove that design is the discipline that makes AI truly useful at human scale.