Marc Andreessen described a Mexican standoff between engineers, designers, and PMs. Everyone thinks they can do the other two with AI.
He's right. But the interesting question is what happens after the standoff.
The barriers fell
Engineers can now generate designs in Figma with AI, designers can write working code in Cursor, and PMs can build prototypes without waiting for anyone.
The tools collapsed the barriers between roles. You don't need to be an expert in all three. You just need to be good enough to ship something.
What the tools can't do
Recognizing which template works, when to throw it away, and what quality looks like before you've seen the final output.
AI can generate a hundred designs in five minutes. Picking the right one requires understanding the user, the brand, the technical constraints, and the tradeoffs between them. A designer who understands systems can spot when a design is technically expensive to build. An engineer who understands design can tell when a UI feels off even though it matches the spec.
Specialty as center of gravity
The people who are doing well with AI tools tend to have a strong core skill and expand outward from it.
A strong core skill gives you a base to expand from. An engineer with design taste ships better products than an engineer without it. A designer who understands how systems work avoids proposing things that look elegant but can't be built. A PM who can build a quick prototype doesn't need to write a spec to test an idea.
The expansion is what matters. Not replacing your core skill with AI, but using AI to reach into neighboring domains where you used to be blocked.
Why pure specialists are struggling
In the old model, you had clear boundaries. Engineers wrote code. Designers made it look good. PMs decided what to build. Each role had a clear handoff point.
In the new model, those handoff points are friction. If you can do two or three roles passably well, you avoid the handoff entirely. You move faster because you're not waiting for someone else to pick up where you left off.
A "PM" who can't build and can't design is someone who writes documents and schedules meetings. A "designer" who can't code and doesn't talk to users is someone who makes things look nice in isolation. Neither role survives the collapse well.
What replaces them
Builders who can oversee the whole system. Not the best at all three roles, but competent enough in each to know where quality is being lost and where corners can be cut.
AI makes this kind of expansion possible in a way it wasn't five years ago. Learning enough design to be dangerous used to take years. Now it takes weeks if you have taste and an AI tool to iterate with.
The people doing well are using AI to expand into adjacent skills rather than doubling down on a single lane.
