On paper, developers should be the first to feel the impact of AI.
That’s not me wishing for it – it’s just the logical conclusion if you strip emotion out of the conversation and look at the nature of the work.
Code is a language built on rules. Strict ones. Syntax, logic, structure, constraints. Computers love rules. So the idea of a computer generating code for another computer? That’s basically AI playing on home turf. Once an AI understands the rules (and they’re well documented), producing functional code becomes a solvable problem – even if it looks complex from the outside.
That’s not to say development is “easy” – it isn’t. But it is deterministic in a way that design simply isn’t.
And that’s where things get interesting.
Design isn’t just how things look
When people talk about AI replacing designers, they often mean UI design – layouts, colours, spacing, components that “look nice” and broadly follow design principles. And yes, AI is already pretty good at that.
You can prompt an AI to design a dashboard, a landing page, or even a full app interface, and it’ll spit something out that looks polished enough to pass a first glance. It’ll use familiar patterns, accessible colour contrasts, sensible typography. Tick, tick, tick.
But design – real design – doesn’t stop there.
UX design lives in the messy middle:
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How do users feel when they hit friction?
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What’s confusing them — even when they can’t articulate it?
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Where are they hesitating, second-guessing, abandoning flows?
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What problem are they actually trying to solve?
That’s not rules-based work. That’s human work.
UX vs Product: the eternal tug of war
There’s always been a battle between UX Designers and Product Managers – and that’s not a bad thing. It’s healthy.
UX Designers advocate for the user. We give a voice to people who don’t sit in roadmap meetings. We empathise, test, observe, and fight for experiences that are intuitive, humane, and sometimes even delightful.
Product Managers, on the other hand, are accountable for outcomes – usually measured in metrics, revenue, and quarterly performance. And I get it. If you’re not prioritising the things that move the business forward, you’re going to get uncomfortable questions pretty quickly.
The danger isn’t that PMs care about profit.
The danger is what happens when profit becomes the only lens.
Why designers might get hit first anyway
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Even though AI is better suited to code than to UX, designers may still feel the impact first.
Why?
Because from a business perspective:
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AI can generate something that looks like design
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It’s fast
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It’s cheap
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It ticks a box
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And it gives the illusion of progress
A business owner, PM – hell, even someone non-technical – can now prompt an AI:
“Design me a booking flow with upsells and a clean UI”
Out comes something shiny. Great!
Then the thinking goes:
“Cool. We’ll just have a dev build this.”
Job done, right?
Well… not quite.
The long-term cost of skipping UX
Those AI-generated designs haven’t been validated.
No user research, no testing, no understanding of emotional friction and no real empathy.
And initially? Everything might look fine.
The numbers might even be fine.
But over time:
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Users feel subtle frustration
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Edge cases pile up
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Satisfaction plateaus
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Growth slows
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Retention becomes harder
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You hit a ceiling you can’t brute-force your way through
That’s usually when the penny drops. Suddenly you’re undoing work, re-analysing flows, retrofitting research, rebuilding trust and fixing things that would’ve been cheaper and easier to do properly in the first place.
Small and medium businesses are especially vulnerable here, but large companies aren’t immune either. Pressure plus short-term thinking is a universal combo.
So…who actually gets hit first?
Logically? Developers should.
Realistically? Designers might.
Not because UX is less valuable – but because its value is harder to quantify until it’s missing. And by the time the absence of good UX becomes obvious, the damage is already done.
AI will absolutely change both disciplines. No doubt about that. But the organisations that thrive will be the ones that understand this:
You can automate outputs. You can’t automate empathy – at least not yet.
And when you finally realise you need it again, you’ll wish you’d never sidelined it in the first place.
