Design execution is cheap now

Claude Opus 5 is amazing, especially 5.5. I can finally get good results in Figma design with it via Figma MCP.

I can give it loose specifications and hard to understand instructions and it will reliably figure it out.

People have been pounding their chests about their AI design process for a while now and I'm sure they made some pretty websites with it, but real enterprise software? I think not.

But now, something genuinely changed.

Claude improved something drastically. Might be the way it reads data from the MCP server, might just be a better harness or a better model, it matters not. The designs it produces are very impressive and leagues above what the native Figma agent can do.

That operational design constraint is collapsing. The composition of the designer's job has changed. Design execution is cheap.

Figma's latest research says something important: developers doing design work increased from 44% to 60%, while designers participating in development went from 21% to 41%. That points toward a world where the roles of designer, developer, PM and business analyst are coming closer, rather than four isolated specialties.

Figma's 2026 hiring research says 82% of surveyed design managers reported their need for designers was stable or increasing. Those numbers come from Figma, not the industry. I believe the AI hype machine was probably right that there will probably be fewer people needed. The rest will need skills not only in Figma and design thinking, but also AI, product thinking, evaluation, systems thinking, research, communication...

Then what happens to roles on the other side?