AI Is Doing to Coding What Canva Did to Design

I like to think of AI’s effect on coding the way Canva changed the design game for Photoshop.

Personally, getting posters made was always frustrating. I’m not the best designer, the effort it took was a lot, and finding someone who matched what I had in mind was hard. So most of the time, I had nothing.

With AI, I can create posters with very little effort and put what I want out there almost instantly. The catch? It doesn’t always do exactly what I want, so I accept some of those limitations.

The same trade, now in software

AI for coding works the same way. You can create what you want, but you’ll have to accept certain limitations. Photoshop gives you total control and takes years of skill; Canva gets you something good enough, fast. Traditional development gives you full control at the cost of time and money; building with AI gets you a working version quickly, with some limits.

For many people, that balance between cost and limitation works.

The biggest win: ideas become prototypes

For others, it’s a great way to turn an idea into something tangible. You no longer need to spend a lot of money and time to get a prototype. It’s much easier to go from idea to visual prototype to feedback, and only then build the real thing. Finding out whether an idea is any good no longer needs a big budget.

The catch: entry-level work is disappearing

One challenge remains. As the easier tasks get replaced by tools that do the work for free, we all still have to go through entry-level experience to become experts in any field. And getting that experience is getting harder, unless you compromise on price.

If someone is just starting out as a designer, their posters will probably look like what the tools produce, and earning money while those tools do it for free gets harder. Someone with real skills will still get things done, but will lose the clients who only came to them for basic work. Software is heading the same way.

Adapt, and carve out the next market

With every new technology, the dynamics change. It’s always a matter of adapting and carving out another market. For anyone starting out, that means building experience more deliberately than before: on real projects, not only paid ones, with real feedback, and with an eye on the work the tools still can’t do.

How do you see AI changing your field?