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. That part was never the expensive one. The expensive part came 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.
Chat is not an agent
Chat is context transport: ask, copy, paste, repeat. An agent lives inside the project folder, reads the state, creates and edits files. The difference isn't speed, it's where the context lives. 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, director, only now the team is a machine. The tool got faster; authorship never left my hands.
// Takeaway Learning to orchestrate an agent today is like learning Figma in 2016. Execution got cheap, judgment got valuable.