What changed, coming back to design after a stint in front-end development, was Figma.
I'd been doing WordPress theming and custom PHP templates long enough to understand the logic of components without having a design tool that thought in them. Long enough, also, to know what I didn't like about front-end: a specific texture of problem where the work is blocked by something in a package you didn't write and can't fully see. NPM errors at 10pm with no obvious cause. Dependency conflicts with no clean resolution. I liked building things. I didn't like being stuck on the unblocking. Coming back to design was the right call.
The logic I'd built up in front-end didn't leave, though. A partial in a WordPress theme is a component in everything but name — you make a change in one file and it propagates, you build something once and reuse it, you start to feel the shape of a decision made upstream becoming a constraint downstream. But in a template file you're imagining the structure. In Figma, you're holding it.
You create a component, attach a style, and watch a change move through a file the moment you make it. The first time a colour style update spread across an entire file without me touching anything else, something clicked — not in how I used the tool, but in how I understood the work. That's where the engineering thinking I'd built up started talking to the design thinking I'd been developing, and the two stopped feeling like different careers.
That's where I fell into design systems properly. The connection between structure and output, the way a decision about a spacing scale becomes a constraint for every team that consumes it, the satisfaction of building something that holds together when someone else picks it up in a context you never anticipated. It was problem-solving I could see, and trace, and feel the edges of.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because I'm not sure I'd fall into it the same way if I were starting now.
The AI tooling in design tools is useful, and I've written about AI and design systems long enough to know better than to dismiss it. But what it's starting to replace isn't just work — it's the friction that makes you understand what you're doing. When you manually set a style and chase it through a file, or spend an hour figuring out why a spacing decision that looked fine in isolation is breaking a layout three screens over, you're learning the system through the failure. The problem is the lesson. The thing that's wrong is pointing at something real about how the pieces relate, and you come out the other side knowing something you didn't know going in, because the tool made you earn the answer.
AI assistance smooths that out. It fills in the gaps, suggests the fix, generates the variant, and the output is often fine — designs look considered, components get made. But the craft knowledge that used to accumulate through wrestling with a file doesn't accumulate the same way when the tool is doing the wrestling for you. The person on the other end may be producing good-looking work without developing much understanding of why the decisions behind it matter.
There's a version of this I'm willing to accept. Tedious work is tedious, and automating the parts that don't require judgement so there's more time for the parts that do is a reasonable trade. But there's a difference between automating the tedious and automating the effortful, and from where I sit, what's being abstracted away now isn't just repetition — it's the problem-solving. The moment where you're stuck on something small and the act of getting unstuck teaches you something about the system you wouldn't have learned any other way. That moment is disappearing, and I don't know what replaces it.
UI is starting to feel disposable in a way that unsettles me. Not as a complaint about quality. Structurally.
The pace of generation means nobody dwells in a screen long enough to notice whether it's actually considered or just plausible, and plausible is increasingly good enough because the bar for "does this look designed" keeps dropping when the tools do the designing. The decisions are still there, technically, but the attention that turns decisions into craft has somewhere else to be.
You can produce a lot of considered-looking work without any of it being considered.
What that produces, eventually, is a design system built fast — surface coherent, components present, tokens named — that frays the moment someone tries to theme it or extend it or hand it to a consuming team. Not because the decisions were wrong, but because nobody fully understood what they were deciding when they made them. The structure held the appearance of intention without the substance of it. I was seeing that pattern before AI tooling existed. The speed increase just makes it easier to arrive there faster, and harder to notice you're heading there at all.
Designers said it about Photoshop. Developers said it about frameworks. The complaint usually ages badly — the people making it tend to look, in retrospect, like they were defending familiarity rather than something real. I'm aware of that, and it's possible this is just what it feels like to watch a practice change and not be the person it's changing for.
But the specific thing that made Figma matter to me wasn't efficiency. It gave me a way to hold abstract structural ideas in my hands — the relationship between a component and a style, between a token and a decision, between a change made in one place and every instance that inherits from it, made visible, made editable, made something you could touch and understand by touching it. That's how I learned to think about the work.
Whether the next layer of tooling gives anyone that same contact with the underlying ideas, I don't know. The people coming into design systems practice now are learning in a different environment, with different feedback loops and different friction levels — that might produce designers who think just as well and just differently. Or it might produce designers who know how to operate tools that have already resolved the decisions for them. The industry can't tell yet either.
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