AI Has Flipped Software Development

Luke Wroblewski argues that AI has flipped software development: first we had designers design a feature, and engineers sort out what code they needed to ship it; now, engineers build a feature using AI, and designers sort out the UX and UI needed to polish it.

I'm unsure if this actually is faster. I'm aware that some of the upfront work designers do can slow things down—there is a balance to how much one should do upfront, and how much should be done in code—but I think designing a feature, ideally, is a little more than “cleaning up” after the engineers, as Luke describes.

There's quite a lot of collaborative design work (or design thinking, if you will) to be done to enable a designer and/or engineer to effectively (vibe)code their way to a working prototype or feature.