The Screen Didn't Change That Much
Product Design
Career Growth
In 1994, I was typing DOS commands into a black terminal screen to make a computer do what I wanted. An hour ago I was typing instructions into Claude Code's terminal to create a GitHub repository. Same black screen. Thirty years between them.
When I built my first website in 1997 (in Netscape Composer, because that's what existed), I had no idea I was starting a pattern. A few years later, employers expected designers to know HTML and CSS. Not to become developers, but to speak the same language. A design that couldn't be built was just a drawing, and learning the constraints made the work better.
Then prototyping tools arrived and the handoff got closer. We stopped delivering static screens and started delivering something you could actually click through. Each shift felt significant at the time. In hindsight, it was the same motion - designers moving incrementally closer to the final product.
The current conversation about designers building with AI follows the same arc. The fidelity of what we can hand over keeps improving. A JPEG became a prototype. A prototype is becoming a working app. The tools changed. The process - understand the constraint, work within it, deliver something real - stayed the same, just at a different scale each time.
Should designers become builders? We always were. The tools just keep catching up.