LukeW | Scale Your Superpowers, Not Your Job Titles

Scale Your Superpowers, Not Your Job Titles

by Luke Wroblewski June 18, 2026

There's a growing sentiment that AI lets you do everyone else's job: designers picking up Claude Code, developers spinning up Figma Make. But maybe the most interesting question isn't "what other jobs can I take on?" but "how do I make the thing I do well reach further?"

When I instruct a coding agent to write a large chunk of code, I can roughly tell what's happening, but I don't have years of professional software development under my belt. I can play a developer on TV. But in real life, I'm a pretty crappy one. The same is true in reverse: a developer can generate a layout, but they don't have the years of pattern recognition that tell a designer what matters and what to throw out.

In other words, the "do it all yourself" approach spreads us thinly across multiple complex and important jobs. That's not a superpower. Unless you want to live out the real-life adventures of Mediocre Man.

Your Unique Value

Years ago at Yahoo!, we built an internal class for designers called Board to Board (from the drawing board to the boardroom). The whole point was instead of convincing people design needs "a seat at the table" by trying to act like business leaders, figure out what designers bring that nobody else at the table has so you get invited. Pattern recognition. Visual communication that makes concepts clear. Those same skills turn out to matter enormously for telling the story of a company, not just a screen.

The lesson was double down on the thing you're uniquely good at and apply it elsewhere. Don't dilute it trying to be a passable version of other roles.

Encode your Expertise

Similarly we can use AI today to do more jobs or to make our one job have much more reach. We've been building this into how we design and build Web sites and applications using collaborative steering. It allows a designer to put rigor and focus on the grid, the typography, motion rules, and color system of an application. They encode that into a shared context that both people and agents apply. A developer does the same with how code gets organized, written, and tested.

In practice this design and development "intent" ends up as text files outlining instructions that AI agents use when building software. Anyone using agents within a codebase with collaborative steering stays aligned with this intent because their agents make use of it when doing work.

With this approach, designers don't have to be present to influence how things are laid out, their intent is scaled with each AI agent. The grid is the grid no matter how many agents are writing code in parallel.

Precision is the skill

Collaborative steering doesn't mean dumping every possible bit of design or development context into agent instructions. It's being precise about what matters because with AI agents today, the more you pile in, the less useful it gets.

And that's where expertise kicks in. Knowing the three to five things that actually matter, in what order, and how they need to be done, is the value add. It's the part you can't fake by playing a role you never trained for. And it's the part worth encoding for everyone else.

AI doesn't mean you should go be everyone. It means you can scale the thing you're uniquely wired for.

What else would you like to know?

↵ Send

Subscribe

Follow

Designing Perplexity

AI Has Flipped Software Development

How Design Teams Are Reacting to 10x Developer Productivity from AI

Tags:<br>ai design<br>ai<br>process

Home

LukeW Characters

"Websites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands." —Forrester Research, 1998

Free online version of my book. Read Mobile First.