The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)

Jenny Wen argues that the familiar design process—research, discovery, repeated divergence and convergence, and polished mockups—no longer fits the speed of AI-assisted engineering. Engineers can create rough working features quickly, so designers increasingly help teams execute, connect separate ideas, and refine the last mile rather than acting as a gate that blocks implementation. Wen describes a shift from spending roughly 60–70% of design time on mockups and prototypes a few years ago to roughly 30–40% today. The change is being driven less by a coordinated decision among designers than by the new capabilities of engineering tools.

Wen does not say that design disappears. She separates the work into implementation support and direction-setting. The second function remains important because many engineers, each working with multiple agents, can produce disconnected features quickly. A designer may now provide a shorter three-to-six-month direction, sometimes as a prototype rather than a polished long-range deck. In Wen’s account, the designer’s job is to help a team’s output make sense together while accepting that the direction may change again as the technology develops.

The interview also qualifies the claim that fast shipping always wins. Wen says teams still use user research, surveys, prototyping, and mockups, but the proportion of time changes. For nondeterministic AI systems, a static mockup cannot represent every state and a clickable prototype may not reveal how people will actually use the model. Testing with real data and real users can expose use cases that designers could not predict in advance. At the same time, the old process has not vanished across the industry: Wen’s talk attracted both strong resonance and backlash from people whose careers are built around discovery and established design methods.