I'm not saying you need to be a full-stack developer. But a few months ago I watched a senior designer spec an interaction that would take three months to build.
The engineer said "this is technically impossible with our current architecture."
The designer had no idea what that meant.
Here's what I've learned managing designers for years: you don't need to code. You need to understand what's hard versus what's impossible.
I've seen designers request real-time collaboration features with zero understanding of websocket complexity. Pixel-perfect animations that break accessibility. Infinite scroll that destroys performance.
Then they get frustrated when engineers push back.
The best designers I worked with? They don't write production code. But they understand rendering, state management, API limitations. They know when they're asking for two days of work versus two weeks.
AI is making design execution easier. But it's not solving the gap between what designers want and what systems can actually do.
If you can't speak the language of technical constraints, you're becoming just a visual decorator. And we already have AI for that. So…you need to become a more technical product designer.