AI is not replacing designers, engineers, or PMs. It is collapsing the distance between thinking and shipping, and forcing a structural reorganization of who does what. The argument in this piece, published on UX Collective, is that the three functions survive but the roles built on top of them transform into three new archetypes: design-oriented builders, engineering-oriented builders, and business-oriented builders. DOBs, EOBs, and BOBs. Small teams of three, each owning a distinct accountability, shipping directly from a shared AI-powered environment instead of passing artifacts down a waterfall chain.
The core argument against generalist AI-everything teams is not about skill coverage. It is about tension. A designer, engineer, and PM arguing toward a decision creates a forcing function that no single person wearing three hats can replicate, because humans cannot hold three competing accountabilities simultaneously. The piece cites research showing AI amplifies the perspective already present on a team rather than correcting for the one that was removed. An all-engineer team running AI agents for design and product decisions does not get balanced judgment. It gets its own engineering bias reflected back at scale. Someone with real domain expertise has to direct the agents, because the agents are only as good as the judgment encoded into them.
The mechanics are worth reading in full. The piece details how codified judgment, the reasoning behind routine low-level decisions written down so AI can execute them autonomously, differs from full expert judgment, and why builders must also define hard boundaries on how far AI and non-experts can go without sign-off. Those boundaries shift as AI capability changes week to week. That dynamic redrawing of lines, not the broad DOB-EOB-BOB framing, is the practical edge of this argument.
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