Gen X gets forgotten AGAIN. Thanks @wsj.com

www.wsj.com/personal-fin...

Design at the Edges When agents absorb the middle of the workflow, what's left is what always mattered.

This week's newsletter gets into all of it. newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/design-at-...

Intercom, Cisco, and Figma all landed on the same answer: design's value is at the beginning and the end. Agents own the middle. The catch: the middle is where junior designers built judgment. We're compressing the workflow and the career ladder at the same time.

The Factory Hasn’t Been Redesigned Yet The productivity everyone's chasing lives on the other side of a redesign nobody's started.

When factories got electric motors in the 1880s, they swapped the steam engine and changed nothing else. For 30 years, output barely moved. Most teams are doing the same thing with AI.

I wrote more about this:
newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-factory-hasnt-been-redesigned

Defend the Role or Follow the Skill The messy middle was never a phase. It was the whole job description.

Designers, we’re in the messy middle stuck between two ends. Do you defend “designer” as a role or follow the skill of design?

I explore this in my latest newsletter.

This method may work for a class of products. But it won’t for vertical SaaS as well, especially if they’re mission critical. Imagine experimenting on an electronic medical record system (nope!) or software for dispatchers. Lots of convos forget about the products that shouldn’t change rapidly.

The Territory You Haven’t Claimed The tools are ready. The demand is real. So what's stopping us?

The design profession got exactly what it asked for: less time pushing pixels, more room for strategy. Most of us are using that time to argue about what designers should be instead. newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-territ...

I can attest to this. Many of my pieces run 2,000–3,000 words but actual reading time on those posts (from analytics) are always under the calculated reading time.

The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) - Roger Wong Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic. Prior to this, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. Before that, she was a designer at Dropbox, Square...

Jenny Wen’s "ship fast, iterate publicly, build trust through speed" approach makes sense for Anthropic. They're building greenfield AI products where nobody knows the right interaction patterns yet.

Switch to Claude without starting over | Claude Transfer your preferences, projects, and context from other AI providers into Claude. Switch without losing what makes your AI useful.

In case you’re looking to switch chatbots, say from a four-syllable one to a single-syllable one: claude.com/import-memory

That was the first time I’d seen that. So crazy!

Wow. LOL

The Grief and the Third Path The craft you're mourning might not be the craft you're losing.

Either abstain on principle or capitulate for the paycheck.

I don’t buy the binary. There’s a third path—use the tools to expand what your craft can produce, and people are already walking it.

Read the full newsletter.

2/2
newsletter.rogerwong.me/p/the-grief-an…

Developers and designers are independently grieving the same thing right now, and it took me a while to realize they’re not mourning the skill but the tribe.

The community that used to care about the craft now feels like it’s about speed, or pulling a slot machine lever on prompts.

1/

I thought the same thing. This might be the inflection point and NOT “AI-washing” as in the earlier layoffs from Amazon, Meta, etc.

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI

www.anthropic.com/news/statement…

Boom. I’m glad @anthropic.com is not caving in. Anti-mass domestic surveillance and anti-autonomous murderbots are moral red lines to have.

Best thing I heard today: “Claude Code is gaslighting me.” 🤣

Check out Reader from ReadWise and Inoreader. Both are great. Unsure if either support fetching feeds from an API though.

Stop Drawing Pictures of Software AI is pushing designers out of Figma and into the material they actually ship.

Just published a new newsletter wrapping up the theme of last week. Design is changing fast due to the new AI tools. Bleeding edge Silicon Valley companies have already made the shift. Our days of drawing pictures of designs to be implemented are numbered.

ASCII Me - Roger Wong ASCII and text-based art are making a comeback: a personal roundup of ASCII art, animated clouds, glyph tools, Mermaid diagrams, and terminal UIs and nostalgia.

Everywhere I look, there’s a new ASCII project. I think it’s sort of a halo effect from Claude Code and the nostalgia designers and developers have for terminals. Anyway, I wrote a roundup of stuff that’s caught my eye.
#designsky

Designers vibe-coding these days...

Product Design Is Changing - Roger Wong Product design is changing: AI shifts work from Figma mockups to design in code, centering orchestration, machine-readable design systems and human judgment.

I’ve been circling this for a while and finally wrote it down. The process shift, designing in code, what stays human. 4/4
rogerwong.me/2026/02/produc…

I’m hearing about designers dropping Figma entirely and designing in code with AI instead. It makes sense when you think about it—every pixel you push in Figma is a promise an engineer has to keep in a completely different medium. That’s a lot of translation for no reason. 3/

Everyone’s debating whether designers will lose their jobs to AI. That’s the headcount version of the question. The thing I keep thinking about is process—who does the work, how fast, and where the new bottlenecks are. 2/

Product Design Is Changing - Roger Wong Product design is changing: AI shifts work from Figma mockups to design in code, centering orchestration, machine-readable design systems and human judgment.

I pointed Claude Code at our design system and got a working screen in three prompts. Didn’t open Figma once. That’s the part of my job I’ve spent decades doing—drawing pictures of apps and handing them to someone else to build. 1/

The Reps You Can’t Skip The work AI makes easiest to skip is the work that matters most.

I’ve been thinking about what actually makes someone good at their job. Not competent, but good. The kind of good where you look at a screen and know something is off before you can articulate why. The kind where you can tell a product decision is wrong from across the room. #designsky

What a lovely piece. Thank you.

100%. And Dukes’s point about manual collection from experts vs automated collection via data is interesting. I didn’t really get it until I read Grazier’s post.