🧂How to be an irreplaceable designer in the AI era

"Junior designers are out of jobs, seriously!"

Last year, two founders who raised friends & family funding came to me. We worked together for 7-8 months on their product before they burned through their budget on talent. They struggled to raise their seed round - investors couldn't see how they'd compete with the giants in their space.

Early this year, they paused working with my studio due to funding issues. Not just us - their entire team left except the two co-founders and one volunteer.

I caught up with them last month to check how they were doing. What they told me changed how I see the entire design industry.

"This would take me a week or two. I did it with Claude in 6 hours."

"A lot of back and forth, of course, but the time I saved is insane. I no longer write PRDs - AI crafts them for me. I can see the prototype the same day."

"Oh this one - I fed it the idea, and it came up with another direction I would have never thought of!"

And then the line that stopped me cold:

"Junior PM and junior designers are out of jobs, seriously!"

This isn't an isolated story.

There’s another founder I talked to says the same thing: they won't rush to hire any full-time designer, not even a freelancer, until they've explored everything AI can do. Only when AI can't handle the level of quality they need for customers do they consider human help.

Junior designers are panicking. I've heard stories of designers with 2-3 years of experience still hunting for their first full-time role.

Hearing this hit me personally.

After a decade in the design industry, was I about to become irrelevant?

I can't predict how fast AI will evolve or how long it takes to replace what even senior designers do. But I have strong beliefs about how to become irreplaceable.

And it started with understanding why I named my studio "Salt."

After years of studying and practicing design, I still find myself struggling to create a thriving business that just runs. There are so many moving pieces in a business, design seems like 10-20% of the puzzle that doesn't matter that much.

That led me to often doubt the role and impact of design in the real world. But at the same time, I cannot help but question:

Everyone just needs shelter and clothes, but why do architecture, interior design and fashion design industries exist?

Before Apple, everyone used Windows for years. We could have said people don't care about design at all. But was it really that users didn't care? Or had they just never experienced what good design could do?

After working in design for over 10 years, I've accepted a hard truth: design often just solves "surface" problems - the look and feel layer. Using food as an analogy, design is never the main dish. It's the ingredient that transforms everything else.

That's why I named my studio Salt.

You don't need salt to make a dish, just like you don't need design to launch your MVP. But add the right amount at the right time, and it drastically changes the entire flavor.

The same is true for design - adding it to your product can shift how people think and use your offering dramatically. Not because it's essential for function, but because it's essential for memory.

The steak fills you up. The salt makes you crave it again.

And that realization changed everything about how I see the AI threat.

Because if design has survived every technological revolution by being the ingredient that transforms utility into desire, then the current AI panic is missing the point entirely.

The founders who told me "junior designers are out of jobs" aren't wrong about the immediate threat. But they're missing what's actually happening beneath the surface.

They see AI replacing the execution - the pixels, the prototypes, the PRDs. But they don't see what AI can't touch: the invisible intelligence that decides why something feels right before users can explain it. The ability to sense that a progress indicator creates anxiety instead of confidence. The intuition that knows when cognitive load will cause unconscious resistance.

While everyone panics about AI replacing designers, what's really happening is a great separation. The designers who only knew how to execute are getting displaced. But the designers who understand human psychology, who can orchestrate experiences, who bridge business objectives with user desires - they're becoming more valuable than ever.

The salt shaker is being replaced. The master chef is being promoted.

But here's what I think designers can do to make them irreplaceable:

1. Master unconscious empathy 

Master the ability to see what users need before they can articulate it. When you instantly know a landing page will perform well or bomb, you're recognizing unconscious human drives: the need for effortless understanding, maximum value with minimum effort, and the desire to act fast and save cognitive energy. This isn't something you find in user interviews - it's something you feel. Design has trained you to bridge the gap between intention and reception.

This skill traditionally took years of job experience to develop. But in the AI era, you can accelerate this by rapidly processing examples of good and bad design. Study what makes interfaces feel effortless versus frustrating. Analyze why certain layouts create trust while others trigger doubt. Train yourself to feel with instinct beyond what AI can optimize at the conscious level - focus on the subconscious responses that drive real human behavior.

2. Adopt AI asap, and become an orchestrator, not executor

AI can shake the salt now, probably more precisely than you when following a recipe. But you decide what flavor the experience should have, which ingredients create the right emotional response, and how much seasoning transforms utility into desire. Don't abandon your taste, judgment, or craft - use AI to execute while you control the quality, nuances, and details that make people remember the experience.

Developing this orchestration skill means pushing beyond AI's first draft. Never accept AI output as final - question the quality, refine the details, and demand the subtle effects that AI overlooks. While AI optimizes for function, you're responsible for the magic that happens in the margins: the micro-interactions that build trust, the spacing that creates calm, the transitions that feel effortless. This level of care requires human judgment that goes deeper than any algorithm.

3. Stack skills beyond design 

The most irreplaceable designers are becoming "Value Orchestrators." They understand markets, they write, they know crypto or fintech or healthcare so deeply that their design decisions come from industry insight, not just aesthetic preference. When you combine unconscious empathy with niche expertise, you can design solutions that both feel right to users AND work within complex business realities.

Starting a business is like paddling a small kayak in the ocean - it requires countless skills to stay afloat. While big boats (large companies) can replace crew members with machines, you need to understand how everything works: acquiring customers, serving them, and monetizing the relationship.

The good news? With AI, you can learn almost anything incredibly fast now. But here's the warning: don't be satisfied mastering just one function in this AI era. Single-skill designers get replaced easily. When you can connect the dots beyond design - understanding markets, psychology, technology, business - you become antifragile. You can survive any market condition and earn a living whether or not you find a traditional job. That's the skill stack to target for your future.

4. Master a specific industry or domain 

Pick one area - crypto, fintech, healthcare, SaaS, e-commerce, or any area you are currently working on, but go really deep to understand the patterns, terms, practices, theory and more. When you know the regulatory constraints of fintech, the user behaviors in crypto, or the compliance requirements in healthcare, your design decisions carry weight that generic designers (and generic AI too) can't match. You're not just making things look good - you're solving problems that only someone with deep domain knowledge would even recognize. This specialization makes you irreplaceable because AI can generate interfaces, but it can't understand the nuanced business realities that shape how those interfaces should actually work.

These four capabilities create a powerful combination: you can feel deeper than AI (through unconscious empathy), move faster with AI (through orchestration), think wider than design (through skill stacking), and go deeper than generalists (through domain expertise). With this foundation, you're not just surviving the AI revolution - you're building something valuable for the world, whether you have a traditional job or not.

The AI era isn't killing design.

It's finally revealing what design really was: the invisible intelligence that makes everything else worth remembering.

The question isn't whether you'll be replaced. It's what type of evolution you'll continue to develop as a human and a designer with the help of AI.

Final note

Those two founders who burned through their budget and turned to AI? They called me last week. Not because AI failed them, but because they hit the exact limit I predicted: AI could execute their ideas, but it couldn't feel what their users needed.

They need someone who can sense the unconscious friction, predict the emotional responses, orchestrate experiences that feel effortless. They will need the salt.

Summary

That’s it! Creatives often fail in business because they focus too much on perfecting their projects, stick rigidly to their rates, lack a clear focus, and get stuck in unscalable models. I hope you learned something through this newsletter and let me know what topics I can cover next!

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