figma made a big chunk of our jobs free at config last week and honestly i think that's a good thing because once you get past the initial panic it's actually pretty clarifying. they shipped native motion, ai shaders you summon from a sentence, code layers, and plugins you build just by asking, so the slow specialized production work that used to be the hard part is mostly a prompt now, and if you sell design the smart move is to get past mourning the craft getting cheaper and start paying attention to where the value quietly moved instead.

when everyone's working off the same canvas with the same agent and the same defaults the work naturally starts to converge, and polish stops being the thing that sets any of us apart, so what's actually left to sell is the decision underneath it, the which-buyer and which-angle and whether-it-should-even-move part that the agent will happily dodge making for you, and that's the part clients still pay us for. i've never once been hired for the logo, and that just got a whole lot more true.

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