The designer became an orchestrator
I stopped pushing pixels one by one and started directing an agent. The design decision is still mine; the execution turned into a conversation.
For years the work was execution: open Figma, move a pixel, repeat. But the expensive part was always the decision before it: what to solve, for whom, why. Execution just ate the time that should have gone to the decision.
The bottleneck moved
Engineering, marketing and finance already sped up with AI. Design is the next bottleneck. PMs and non-designers already ship interfaces that are "80% good enough." When execution becomes a commodity, what stays valuable is judgment: strategy, taste, and the bar for what's actually good.
Where the context lives
Chat is context transport: ask, copy, paste, repeat. An agent lives inside the project folder, reads the state, creates and edits files. The difference that matters is where the context stays: with an agent, it stops leaking between windows.
What I do now
I set the strategy and the rules. The agent executes code and layout. I review, cut, point the direction. It's the same role as always, the director's, only now the team is a machine.