AI won't replace designers because it lacks taste and subjective opinion. Instead, as AI gets better at generating highly opinionated (though not perfect) designs, it will serve as a powerful exploration tool. This plants more flags in the option space, allowing human designers to react, curate, and push the most promising directions further, amplifying their strategic role.

Using AI to code doesn't mean sacrificing craftsmanship. It shifts the craftsman's role from writing every line to being a director with a strong vision. The key is measuring the AI's output against that vision and ensuring each piece fits the larger puzzle correctly, not just functionally.

The common fear of AI eliminating jobs is misguided. In practice, AI automates specific, often administrative, tasks within a role. This allows human workers to offload minutiae and focus on uniquely human skills like relationship building and strategic thinking, ultimately increasing their leverage and value.

AI-generated design falls short because it cannot integrate the myriad of constraints top designers handle: business goals, cultural context, brand emotion, and system-wide consistency. AI will eliminate drudgery, freeing designers to focus on this higher-level, holistic, and creative work.

Hera's core technology treats motion graphics as code. Its AI generates HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to create animations, similar to a web design tool. This code-based approach is powerful but introduces the unique challenge of managing the time dimension required for video.

As AI models become proficient at generating high-quality UI from prompts, the value of manual design execution will diminish. A professional designer's key differentiator will become their ability to build the underlying, unique component libraries and design systems that AI will use to create those UIs.

By handling repetitive production work, AI gives designers bandwidth to focus on high-impact, creative problems. This includes innovating on previously overlooked details like loading states, which have new importance in AI-driven products for building user trust.

AI will handle most routine tasks, reducing the number of average 'doers'. Those remaining will be either the absolute best in their craft or individuals leveraging AI for superhuman productivity. Everyone else must shift to 'director' roles, focusing on strategy, orchestration, and interpreting AI output.

With AI tools like Gemini 3.0 democratizing execution, the ability to generate unique, scroll-stopping ideas and provide strong design references becomes the key differentiator. Good taste and a clear vision now matter more than the technical ability to implement a design from scratch.