What happens when everyone can prototype?
Everyone can prototype now. That doesn't make design irrelevant — it just proves how much of the job was never the prototype.
Tools like Figma AI, v0, Bolt, and Lovable have made it genuinely easy for anyone — a PM, a founder, an engineer — to generate a high-fidelity, clickable prototype in minutes. No design background required. That used to be the bottleneck: turning a requirement into something people could actually see and react to. Now it isn't.
So the debate that's kicked off is predictable. If anyone can prototype, what's a designer even for? Is this the death of design?
I think that's the wrong debate.
Prototyping was always the output, not the job
The actual job is what happens before and after the prototype: what are we assuming, what decision does this support, what breaks when a real user touches it, what edge case did nobody model. That's thinking work — discovery, validation, iteration. AI hasn't touched any of it. What it's sped up is the tactical craft: turning a decision into pixels. That was never the hard part.
The problem is that a high-fidelity AI prototype looks finished.
So teams treat it as finished. It reads as further along than a wireframe ever did, and that anchors everyone on a solution before it's been interrogated. The thinking gets skipped, not replaced.
Nobody's claiming that work right now. Not UX. Not PM. It's falling through the gap — and it compounds: five PMs using five different AI tools produce five different interaction dialects, with no one job responsible for making them cohere into one product.
Everyone can prototype now.
That's fine, genuinely. What I care about is whether the hard thinking — the framing, the validation, the edge cases — got done before the prototype became the answer.