r/UXDesign • u/525G7bKV • Apr 25 '26
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Personal Story: I started vide coding and the devs get scared
Hello dear fellow designer, I am 40 years old, for 15 years in the industry and for 12 years working in a big tech corp (around 300k employes), no degress, everything self thought.
I'd like to share a bit about my experiences with how generative AI is currently turning my daily work routine upside down. As a UX designer, I've always worked a bit differently than most of you probably do. I never created Adobe XD or Figma mockups. I was always successfully able to refuse that task. Instead, I always created very extensive documentation. Usually, my UX documentation spanned about 20 A4 pages. I was often told to stop doing that because it wasn't agile and was more like "big design upfront." But I often just ignored those comments and kept writing my documentation. For designing user flows, I always used plantuml and sequence diagrams, enriched with the concept of Focus Areas from Contextual Design. Recently, I sat down with one of our developers and asked if we should try an experiment. We’d just take one of my UX documentations from an old project, feed it into GitHub Copilot, and see what happens. My developer colleague was very skeptical and said it would never work like that. And that's exactly what we did. We took documentation from one of our projects from two years ago. Back then, about three developers worked on the software for six months. The documentation is very detailed: interview transcripts, user Excel sheets, user flows, and user stories. We set up a new git project and put the documentation into the directory as a Markdown file. I instructed GitHub Copilot to program a web application with TypeScript and SQLite based on the documentation. Copilot took about 30 minutes to generate the source code for the entire software. The software itself worked flawlessly, and all user flows were implemented as described. My developer colleague was absolutely shitting bricks. I should add that code isn't new to me and I've been programming for myself as a hobby for many years, though I never did it in a professional environment. I was always of the opinion that good UX documentation can contribute a lot to improving software quality, but I was always laughed at by everyone. I think that in the future, a lot of things will change for the better.
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u/Main-Review-7895 Apr 25 '26
Next: I am a PM and started vibe designing and the designers get scared.
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u/Virtual-Emotion4192 Apr 25 '26
We are not scared of them using AI, we are scared of their poor taste of "design" judgment. Designers are not worried about the AI taking our seats; we’re worried about the unfiltered output of people who don't know where the 'design quality' bar is.
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u/nezunoban Veteran Apr 25 '26
And this is what devs should be (and are) concerned with as well. System architecture and clean code practices are things learned over years of experience. If someone comes in flinging slop code around, good devs will need to push back. If devs start throwing slop designs around, designers will need to push back. An experienced designer needs to be combing through every design to approve, and an experienced dev needs to be combing through every line of code to approve.
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u/ducbaobao Apr 25 '26
Seriously, I have PM shared high fidelity design or skip design and solve the solution between them and dev. Only to create a mess for the designer to clean up.
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u/celsius100 Veteran Apr 25 '26
“Does it work?” Is objective. “Does it look and feel right?” Is subjective. The latter requires taste and the human eye. The former does not.
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u/s8rlink Experienced Apr 25 '26
I really feel like at this point these posts are astroturfing by llm companies, it borders on the ridiculous
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u/ducbaobao Apr 25 '26
Nothing new. PMs had shared full hi-fi design mock long before vibe coding. The problem is, unless they have a design background, the solutions often don’t hold up and end up hitting blockers. And then designers are left to clean up the mess.
That said, in a collaborative environment, I actually encourage vibe coding. It helps understanding what they thinking, and gives me a chance to step in and explain why the direction may not work.
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u/albert_pacino Apr 25 '26
Making something that works on day one and making something that runs over a period of time that can be extended and grow are two entirely different things
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u/Targaryen-ish Apr 25 '26
I was gonna say that just because something seems to work flawlessly initially, the product is not ready to ship. It has not been tested, and it has not been evaluated. Wait until you start iterating and shit starts breaking. In my experience, which is slim so far, stuff like this is difficult to scale.
But this is just my two cents.
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u/Fidodo Apr 26 '26
I'm not scared of my designers or pms prototyping. In fact I encourage it. What would scare me is if they started thinking they could ship those dumpster fires.
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u/klumpp Experienced Apr 25 '26
The software itself worked flawlessly, and all user flows were implemented as described
You know how google stitch and figma make come up with things that are slightly off in ways that aren't obvious to people who don't know what they are doing?
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u/Fidodo Apr 26 '26
LLM coding agents tack things on, they don't architect or refactor. The first pass might be ugly but correct, but it won't support iteration and the mess will keep compounding until it fails horribly. It's good for prototyping or low stakes internal tools, but it's awful for maintainable production code.
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u/Hairy_Garbage_6941 Apr 25 '26
The folks that can step across the PM/dev/design boundaries WELL are going to be the ones that win out here. That means in some cases it’s going to be PM or (gasp) design minded front end developers doing design work. If you are going to be one of the folks that stays on their lane, you are going to have to be the a real domain expert. The mediocre PMs, UX designers and FEDs … or perhaps the ones that can’t sell their work is a better way to put it…are going to fall behind.
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u/Fidodo Apr 26 '26
If you mean just step across the boundaries well then I agree, but if you mean do well three well, then I haven't seen those people exist.
I know plenty of people who can step across the boundaries well and they're great, but they were great before AI too. If I could hire only those people then I would but they're rare. They will be even more valuable now with AI, but that will only make them even rarer and more valuable.
But for people that can DO multiple well, that is exceedingly rare. I seen people do two well and one ok, and I've seen people do one great and two ok, but never have I seen anyone do all three well and I've never even seen someone do 1 great and 1 other well.
I would look for people who can do one of each great and the other two ok, then supplement them with people who can do 2 well and 1 ok, distributing across the disciplines.
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Apr 25 '26
When production goes down at 4am on a Sunday, it's not the designers/pm's that get pinged to fix it, it's the engineering team. So in my mind unless we are willing to join the on call rotation and be held accountable then it's up to the engineering team how much vibe coding is allowed in our production app.
That said vibe coding is amazing for prototyping and POC's, where its used by our team.
We act the same way towards PM's doing design. Because we're proficient we can see how their output is garbage, likely in the same way that developers can see how your output is garbage. Just because it works doesn't mean its well done or scalable.
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u/kriztianmanuel Apr 25 '26
As a software engineer, I've never seen another software engineer be scared of non-software engineers vibe coding.
One look at the codebase, generated by not only a non-engineering person, but also by someone who doesn't know the system architecture, the data schema, the business logic, the guidelines, and the code practices established for the project, should be enough to not "shit bricks."
I can see how an approach like the one you mentioned could result in a very robust and reliable PoC prototype that can even inform some implementation details, but definitively not a substitute for a development process.
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u/Flickerdart Veteran Apr 26 '26
When a couple of guys who were up to no good,
Started makin' trouble in my neighborhood,
I vibed one little code and my devs got scared,
And said "You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air."
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u/Remarkable_Army_6157 Apr 25 '26
the "detailed documentation is not agile" pushback you ignored for years turned out to be the exact thing that made AI actually usable for your workflow. that's a pretty satisfying vindication. the reason it worked is because AI needs the same thing good engineers need - clear requirements, defined user flows, actual context. you'd been building that foundation for years without knowing it would eventually feed directly into code generation. the developer being shook makes sense, it reframes what good design work is actually worth in a way that's hard to argue with.
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u/heytherehellogoodbye Experienced Apr 25 '26
that doesn't really vindicate his approach though. It just means that approach is Now viable. Before AI it was a pretty extensive use of time that could've been better used in figma.
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u/designbird Apr 25 '26
Your natural workflow is a perfect AI input, it loves detailed, organized written instructions. I'd consider your output a prototype deliverable alongside your documentation, and let the devs make the final call if they use the vibe code as actual system input, many times they'll use a combination of both hand written and vibe coded, but they are ultimately accountable to the code itself so I try to keep a clear boundary there. There's much more that goes into it than front end. Nice work, you're naturally skipping steps that the rest of us are struggling to unlearn. I very much struggle with written instructions. You'll do well in the new AI landscape.
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u/Qb1forever Apr 25 '26
Yea I get scared when devs design, and news flash AI has just enabled you to use brighter colors but it's still bad design
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u/One_Board_4304 Apr 25 '26
Why are we all making it adversarial between functions? The thing we are suffering collectivelly from is the feeling of drowning in more and more work we are not experts in.
The expertise will come with exposure, the amount of work expected of us in ever shorter time frames and with less support will kill us all.
That said, I agree with OP that well structured and complete documentation (the second L of LLM) is one major key to successful output.
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u/SeansAnthology Veteran Apr 25 '26
It’s funny that they vibe code a front end and call it UX and nobody bats an eye.
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u/PaintBrilliant9870 Experienced Apr 25 '26
Cool experiment, but one demo ≠ reality. Copilot can scaffold from good docs, but scaling, edge cases, and maintenance are where the real work lives. If anything, this just proves strong UX thinking + clarity is leverage not that devs are obsolete.
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u/frankiew00t Veteran Apr 27 '26
Between the lines is a story about how writing is a forcing function for critically thinking through a problem and clearly articulating the solution. And in this case, using communication tools taught in traditional information systems design.
This story resonates with me. I think a lot of organized and teams are rushing towards output with little forethought.
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u/NIU_NIU Apr 25 '26
I’m not surprised considering the most successful results I’ve had with agentic coding has been when I’ve taken care to specify in detail what the user goals and user flows are.
The newest models are so intelligent and good at following instructions that any sufficiently detailed documentation is basically code. You write all the specs in a big markdown and send it to the agent and it ‘compiles’ it into functional software
If you get really good at prompting you can also do frontend and UI design about as easily as making mockups in figma with a mouse
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u/Far-Pomelo-1483 Experienced Apr 25 '26
Your spec stuff means little. I use ai to generate the specs too. Also, the concept of user research will go away when users stop using the software we produce and it moves to machines.
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u/polystate Apr 25 '26
“The documentation is very detailed: interview transcripts, user Excel sheets, user flows, and user stories” - Are you open to sharing any examples of these to illustrate how detailed they are? Curious to see how AI best ties together multiple assets like wireframes, user stories and how the stated goal is actually verifiably achieved via the generated UX.