Many designers already have Claude or an agent in Figma. Conversations about the industry often turn to the fear that agents will eventually take all the work. While we argue about whether that will happen, the way projects get done is already changing.
In my previous essay, Designing Through an Agent, I looked at how agents are reshaping tools and the profession as a whole. This piece is about what they change in the craft itself.
Unlike an image generator, an agent does more than return a result on request. It carries out a chain of actions in your files and tools: building scenes, editing the project, producing adaptations. So you can hand it an entire task, and sometimes the first version is enough. But when the result has to match the intent precisely and survive several rounds of revisions, full autonomy stops saving time. What you gain in production you lose recovering good decisions that disappeared in the latest revision.
That is why, for the near future, I'm betting on a hybrid approach. The agent completes whole stages of work. The designer sets the direction, decides where to check the result and steps in personally wherever it's faster by hand.
This kind of work calls for a different set of skills. The craft doesn't disappear — it moves from the hands to the head. And there is a paradox here: the less a designer does by hand, the better they need to understand how it's done. Below are ten skills that used to be needed occasionally and are now needed every day.
Setting the Direction
1. Framing the Brief
When designers do the work themselves, the idea can stay half-intuitive. It sharpens along the way: move something, look, realise what you wanted. When execution goes to an agent, there is no "along the way". The idea has to exist before the work begins — and it has to exist in words.
So the ability to articulate clearly what you want becomes a core skill. Not "a logo reveal animation", but the character of that reveal: does the logo jump in or settle into place, is the movement sharp or unhurried? If the designer has no answer, the agent will fill in the most probable option. It will look decent and be indistinguishable from a hundred others.
2. Systems Thinking
An agent works with what's in front of it. It improves a scene, a frame, a transition — and does it well. But it doesn't hold the connections between the parts. Make the transition in the third scene more energetic, and on its own it gets better, but the video now has two climaxes instead of one. Or the opposite: a series of thirty formats looks consistent in thumbnails, while up close the logo sits differently in each.
So a designer needs to move freely between scales: to see the whole — the campaign, the video, the rhythm from start to finish — and to dive into a single detail without losing sight of it. What matters most is knowing which level a problem lives on. If the whole is weak, there's no point fixing a frame. If one frame is weak, there's no need to rebuild the video. The agent will do either, but only someone who sees both levels can decide which one is needed.
3. Art Direction
An agent can make almost anything. But someone has to look at the result and say: this is good, this isn't. That eye is the designer's main value when working with an agent. It doesn't come from a prompt and it can't be delegated.
In effect, every designer working with an agent becomes the art director of their own production. They used to judge their own work; now they judge someone else's, and there's far more of it. A trained eye, taste, an understanding of why one frame is alive and another is dead — this is what determines the final quality. The agent produces the options; the level of the work is set by whoever chooses.
Organising the Work
4. Delegation
To decide what to hand to an agent, you need to understand your own work well: where it's mechanics and where it's decisions. The agent will do the mechanics faster. Decisions are sometimes quicker to make by hand.
My test is simple: which is faster — checking it or doing it? Twenty adaptations of a video for different formats can be checked at a glance, so hand them over. The timing of a single gesture has to be felt, and describing a feeling in words takes longer than nudging a couple of frames yourself. A designer who knows the craft from the inside sees this line. One who is used to only setting tasks will try to describe in words what would be easier to just do.
5. Craft Standards
An agent delivers work that looks finished. Whether it's well made can only be judged by someone who knows how it should be. That's why craft standards have to live in the designer's head, even if they build projects themselves less and less often.
How a clean project is structured, why text should stay editable, why shared parameters live in one place, what happens when the video has to lose two seconds. A designer who doesn't know this will approve the work from the preview, and the problems will surface in the third round of revisions. Standards are what let you demand quality and check for it. Without them, a designer isn't reviewing the work, just looking at it.
The same goes for when something breaks. The agent will propose a fix, but whether it removed the cause or hid the symptom can only be judged by someone who knows what an animation is made of and what affects what. Without that understanding, the designer accepts any explanation that sounds convincing.
Steering Through Revisions
6. Precise Feedback
A designer's eye is only as useful as it is transferable. Before, the feeling that something was off could be fixed by hand straight away, without putting it into words. Now it has to be translated into language, and that's a separate skill.
"I don't like it" and "make it livelier" don't work: the agent will change everything at once. Good feedback names what isn't working, why, and what must not be touched. "Remove the bounce — the brand is about calm, nothing should spring." That takes a vocabulary: rhythm, accent, hierarchy, pause. A designer who can talk this way gets noticeably more out of an agent than one who can only judge.
7. Checkpoints
Checking everything is impossible, and not checking is dangerous: an agent always reports that the task is done. So a designer needs to understand the structure of the work well enough to know where mistakes become expensive. In a video, that's usually the first scene. It sets the rhythm, and everything else builds on it. If you only see it in the final cut, you'll have to rework the whole video along with it.
This matters most with bulk changes. A single instruction can swap the typeface across thirty campaign versions in a minute. A designer who knows what depends on what will remember the longest headline and the narrowest format, test on those first and keep a restore point. One who doesn't will find out about the broken line breaks after publication.
How you look matters too. A still frame won't show rhythm. Motion has to be watched in motion, at real speed, and where it will actually be seen: on a phone screen, not in a preview window on a large monitor.
8. Managing Resources
When an option costs a minute, the constraint is no longer production time but the ability to choose. An agent is ready to produce new versions endlessly. Only a person can stop.
So decisiveness becomes a professional skill. Before a new round, you need to know what question it answers. If there is one — say, whether the idea works in a vertical format — the round is justified. If not, new options don't bring you closer to a decision; they postpone it. Twenty options instead of three isn't thoroughness. It's uncertainty passed on to the client.
Making the Process Repeatable
9. Formalising Experience
Much of a designer's experience is intuitive. They sense how long text should stay on screen but would struggle to explain why exactly that long. Intuition can't be handed to an agent. It has to be turned into rules.
A good rule includes a reason and an example. Not "keep the text on screen longer", but "keep the text on screen long enough to be read twice: viewers look at the image first and only then at the caption". An agent will apply a rule like that even where you didn't anticipate it. And the designer, by formulating it, sees their own taste from the outside for the first time — and understands what their level actually rests on.
10. Scaling the Process
When a process is written down for an agent, it's written down in full for the first time. Which references matter most, what counts as approved, who to show contentious decisions to — everything that used to live in someone's head now exists as text.
This changes the designer's role. Their value now lies not only in their own work but in the system others work within: colleagues and their agents. Testing that system is easy. Give a colleague the same task and the same instructions, and compare their result with yours. Where the versions diverge, there's knowledge that never made it into the text. Being able to find it and write it down is part of the craft too.
In Place of a Conclusion
Agents aren't taking the designer's work. They take the part that can be described and leave the part that can only be judged. Almost every skill above comes down to the same thing: seeing, understanding and articulating what the agent does but cannot evaluate on its own.
Which raises a question I don't yet have an answer to. Taste, standards and a sense of where a mistake gets expensive used to come from years of hands-on work. If that work is increasingly done by agents, where will people entering the profession get that experience? Perhaps it's sometimes worth deliberately doing by hand what you could delegate. Not for the result, but for the understanding.