Design is more than code - Linear
Designing with code is a recurring discussion, and it’s flared up again. I’ve written about it twice now. Design as a search, not a pipeline. How tools carry opinions, and how those opinions shape what feels “reasonable” to attempt. Why constraints that arrive too early can close off possibilities before you’ve had a chance to find them. I’m skeptical of the industry’s drive toward grand unification, collapsing a nuanced process into code and calling it progress. The recent discourse has focused on whether designers should code, whether code is the right medium for design, how code “presents the truth” of a design, and so on. But I think centering this debate on code and tools is reductive. The bigger question to me is what happens to how we see designers contributing in the future, especially now with AI and these new tools. How do roles evolve, and what do we start expecting from each of them? Are designers now engineers, with the same expectations? Do engineers start having the same