It's that time of year again. I redesigned my portfolio (austenezzell.com). I've done this at the same time of year for most of my career. It's become a ritual: a forcing function to reflect on what's changing and what I want to carry forward.

This year feels different though. Software and the tools we use to make it are changing faster than ever. The role of the designer is evolving in real time.

I'm trying something new: writing down what I'm seeing happen in design and software. These aren't bold predictions—they're honest observations about where things are moving, shaped by countless conversations with Vincent Paquet, Brian Peterson, Craig Walker, Joshua Hynes, Wyn Merchant and the team at Dialpad.

Coding becomes table stakes for product designers. If you can't code, you can't keep up. The velocity gap will be impossible to ignore. Teams won't wait.

Figma shifts from production tool to whiteboard. The design stack is rebuilding around code. Cursor + Claude make it easier than ever to design in the browser. Figma becomes where you think, not where you build. Code becomes the source of truth.

Teams get smaller and do exponentially more. The constraint isn't talent anymore—it's how well you can orchestrate humans and AI together. Small, interdisciplinary teams will move faster than large traditional orgs.

The interdisciplinary designer becomes irreplaceable. Brand, product, code, systems, AI—these aren't separate skills anymore, they're the baseline. Designers who move fluidly across all of them will be worth 10x a specialist.

LLM skills are replacing brand guidelines. Brand guidelines have traditionally been static PDFs that don't evolve until it's too late. These new skills, GPTs, and Gems not only understand your business, your brand and your users, they enable your entire company to speak in a unified brand voice with a consistent visual language and decision-making patterns. These teams can create brand systems that learn, evolve, and pivot in near real-time.

AI commoditizes features, brand and UX become the differentiator. Making interfaces look good has become trivially easy. The market will flood with functional-but-generic software. The winners will be products that feel distinctly themselves—where brand is baked into the product experience—and that solve real user problems with depth and clarity. AI can generate pretty screens, but it can't understand context, uncover latent needs, or design for how people actually work. Taste, judgment, deep user empathy, and cultural fluency can't be automated (yet).

Design gets fun again. For the first time in years, designers have new problems to solve and new tools to master. The constraints are different. The possibilities are wider. If you're curious, this is the best time to be a designer.