The brilliant designer Louie Mantia, writing about a dearth of good design amidst third-party App Store apps, but expressing a sentiment that I think is true about the internet as well:
… software engineers have taken over more of the responsibility of designing apps. That would be great if that meant the overall design of apps has improved, but I think we can see that it has not.
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Apps should be beautiful. They should be much more beautiful than they are now. Don’t you think so? Years ago, when I worked at Apple, my official role was Visual Designer. Think about that for a minute. I think about it a lot. My job was primarily to make things look good. I would get a wireframe from a UI designer and turn that into something that users want to look at and interact with. (It was a cool job.)
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Virtually every app is owned and directed by an engineer. (Before you jump in, I know there are exceptions. And I know some are marketing or business-driven.) But designers generally don’t own or direct the apps they work on. At best, they’re still ranked below the engineer who owns the product. It’s been this way for nearly 15 – 20 years. Before that, I think there were a lot more designer-and-engineer partnerships.
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I don’t know how you feel, but so far the collective output from this experiment has me convinced that this approach is neither financially viable nor a mechanism for making good products. It’s just a lot of people pumping out apps that — generally speaking — no one but them wants to use, because the entire direction of each of these vibe-coded apps only ever seem to satisfy one person, the person who “made” it.
The entire post is excellent and well worth your time. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I read it, and I think he’s right: my experience working with startups and larger firms is that engineers rule the roost, generally. They dictate everything from the frameworks to the UI kits they want to use, and sometimes your job is to assemble a whole from somebody else’s junk bin.
But the rise of LLM-enabled programming has dramatically reduced the UX role. Engineers don’t think they need a designer anymore, because speed is a more important metric for capitalism than usability, which is harder to measure and reaps fewer immediate rewards.
Earlier this year, I fired a client when they asked me to start designing everything in Claude Code and other similar AI-based design tools. They were hoping designs would be made faster, and that the code would come almost pre-ready after I was done designing.
My mantra was that Claude is about 7x slower than I am (or was; I don’t know if it’s gotten faster), and the output is much worse. I don’t mean to imply that Claude’s output was “not bad.” It was awful. At one point while I was trialling it, I asked it to design a new feature for a music venue, and it designed a dating app. When I asked what I did to make it misinterpret my instructions, it told me it executed my instructions perfectly. I am not making this up!
Despite all this, the client told me they wanted me to use AI tools instead, and that they hoped my role would shift to PM.
So I fired them from my client list.
I was grateful I was in a position to take the financial hit. I felt my business couldn’t succeed, long-term, if I was doing this sort of work.
But in that position, it was obvious that many of these startups and firms don’t care about design. They care about whatever’s hot. For years, the Cool Thing To Do was have a great designer on your team, even if you stonewalled them at every step of the way, because then you could say you were doing the Cool Thing.
Now, the Cool Thing is making everything with AI. And since these companies don’t need to pretend they care about design anymore, their true colours are much more obvious.