The other night, I built a working app prototype in a single sitting to transform json into a format I wanted. Just prompts and a few tweaks. It kind of blew my mind. It got me thinking about how people are learning to code these days and it feels like something different is happening. There’s what people call “vibe coding.” It’s kind of a funny name, but it makes sense. Instead of obsessing over every little detail of syntax or trying to memorize all the quirks of a language, more people are just focusing on how things fit together. It’s about building stuff that works well, flows nicely, and makes sense. It’s more about knowing how to lay out your ideas clearly and how to explain them in a way that the computer—or an AI – can help you bring to life.
When I was learning design, the history always came first. We learned about monks copying manuscripts by hand, hunched over wooden desks in cold, dimly lit rooms, the scent of ink thick in the air and the slow scratch of quills echoing through the silence. It always made me imagine how quiet and focused that world must have felt, each stroke of the pen a little act of devotion. how every letter was drawn with care and patience. Then came the printing press, then movable type, and then paste-up boards. But no one expected us to go through all those stages ourselves. We didn’t have to learn calligraphy or how to set metal type by hand just to be good designers. We had Photoshop, and later Figma, and those tools took care of a lot of the stuff that used to take forever. What mattered was how you thought about space, type, and layout—not whether you could run a letterpress.
Learning to code is heading in that same direction. You don’t need to have every JavaScript method memorized to be useful. What helps now is being able to think through a problem, figure out how different parts of a system connect, and describe what you want in a way that makes sense. The AI helps with the rest. It’s kind of like being the one giving directions on a road trip, not the one driving every single mile. Sure, knowing how to drive is useful, but the real skill is in knowing where you’re going and why.
I get why some people feel weird about it. I remember the first time I saw someone use an AI tool to build an entire layout in seconds – something that would’ve taken me weeks of focused hours. I knew the ground was shifting under my feet. I’d spent years learning the ins and outs of HTML and CSS, sweating the details. Watching someone skip straight to the fun part was crazy. It made me question what all that practice was worth. But eventually, the feeling of cheating gave way to something else – curiosity, maybe even relief. If the tedious parts were being taken care of, maybe I could finally focus on the bigger picture. If you’ve spent years grinding through code and solving problems by hand, it might feel a little strange – or even unfair – that someone can now describe a feature and get a working version back in seconds. There’s a little sting to that. But it also opens up the whole world of building software to people who used to bounce off the wall of syntax and setup. And that’s a good thing.
We’re kind of in this moment where writing a good prompt is starting to feel like writing good code. It’s more important to understand what makes a project well-structured, what kinds of tools and components make sense together, and how to keep things organized. You still need to have taste, and judgment, and the ability to fix things when they go sideways. But you don’t have to hand-code every piece from scratch to be good at it.
So no, you don’t have to learn calligraphy to be a great designer anymore. And maybe you won’t have to write out every line of code to be a great developer either. What matters is knowing how to build something solid, something thoughtful – and knowing how to guide the tools to help you do it. So the real question is: if the hard parts are getting easier, what will you choose to focus on? How will you use that freedom to create something truly meaningful? to be a great designer anymore. And maybe you won’t have to write out every line of code to be a great developer either. What matters is knowing how to build something solid, something thoughtful – and knowing how to guide the tools to help you do it.
Photo by Kaur Kristjan on Unsplash