"Should designers code?" If you're anything like me and have been around this industry for a while now, I'm sure that's a question that brings about feelings akin to those you get when a fashion item becomes too trendy and you get visual fatigue from the 22nd pair of Adidas Sambas on your Instagram feed again.

I think this is a conversation in my field that gives me a whole lot of discourse fatigue, because I think it's such a misguided question to begin with and the reality of creation is a bit more messy than the dichotomy of "designers who code" vs "designers who don't". I mean there are so many different types of developers and that alone tells us that code is a tool that does a lot of jobs, but if we look a bit closer one thing you'll realise is that to some extent it's all a spectrum.

On one end you have designers who aren't interested in shipping any code, maybe they're more interested in other aspects of product design: mapping out flows, information hierarchy, brand identity in product, and so on. On the other end we have design and product engineers, shipping production code and thinking through UI details. In a lot of ways this exists outside of design culture as well, within a spectrum that runs from low level programming all the way up to vibe coders programming in English.

But there is a messy middle that throws the whole notion on its head. To discuss that we first need to talk about abstraction. Abstraction is just a fancy word for how far removed you are from the actual machine. Every programming language ever written has been an attempt to speak less like a computer and more like a human. English is the logical conclusion of that, the final abstraction layer, the one we've been building toward the whole time without knowing it. If English is the hottest new programming language, then jargon becomes the hottest new framework.

The specificity with which you can talk UI is a product design skill that will ultimately matter more, and it's a skill that throws the spectrum of technical ability on its head. If one designer remembers more Tailwind classes and another has a deep understanding of UI components and can prompt with richer context, who would you consider more technical, considering this new abstraction layer is now embedded into the technical paradigm?

So the question shouldn't be whether designers should code or not, but rather how much technical fluency designers should acquire, be it in code or plain English, to create with as much contextual awareness as possible.